"the Art Of War" Grammar Study

The grammatical researches of SunZi's Art of War have been few. The paper tries to reveal the grammatical characteristics and laws to fill the blank of this field by the painstaking description of the grammatical facts in it Just like the saying goes, the sparrow may be small but it has all the vital organs. The author hopes that the paper may enlighten the others on the research of Chinese grammar.The research of the paper consists of two parts: morphology and syntax. Morphology comprises notional words and function words. Since there are so many nouns, verbs and adjectives and it's difficult to analyse them one by one, so the paper only chooses high-frequency words and disyllabic words and the following is the conclusion of the research: As the word's part of speech and grammatical functions in Sunzi are stable, so they can be classified. Though there is the object in word form as so as its usage, most of them are not truly so. They belong to the words which have two nature and they are two words in the grammatical sense. Only few of them have temporary functional variability. The characteristic of Chinese words lacking morphology symbols and changing frequently determines that Chinese words can't set up an absolute unitary classification standard which has exclusiveness to the other groups and absoluteness to its own group. Therefore, statistics of words is of special significance to judge Chinese words' part of speech. We draw such a conclusion through the research of Sunzi's function words: the application of function words is related to rhyme scheme (meter)and mood besides sentence structures and meanings. The less their meaning is, the tenser the relation with rhyme scheme and tone. As adverbs and prepositions are meaningful, so rhyme scheme and tone have less influence upon them while auxiliary words and conjunctions are less meaningful, they are more influenced by rhyme scheme and tone. Syntax includes sentence structures, simple sentences, compound sentences and sentence groups. We basically agree with Mr ZhuDexi's phrase-based syntax, but we holds the opinion that phrase structures are different with sentence structures. We discover that nominal phrases and verbal phrases have distinct difference in constituting sentences since nominal phrases can not make up a sentence while verbal phrases can. However, only subject-predicate phrases can compose sentences independently while non-subject-predicate phrases can only be used as clauses in the compound sentences. The simple sentences in SunZi are divided into two categories in the paper: expositive sentences and narrative ones and the paper reveals the differences in structures, meanings, functions, etc between the two categories. It also makes thorough and careful research into SunZi's compound sentences and sentence groups, including their structure gradations, semantic relations, conjunctive means and their differences.