Studies On The Verbs Of Buddhist Scriptures In Donghan Dynasty

The Buddhist scriptures is one of the important corpus of Middle Ancient Chinese study.Verbs are the basic word category of a language and the core of sentences.The semantic features of a verb in one sentence determine what kinds of grammatical elements can appear before or after it.This dissertation researches on the verbs in the 17 Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures in East Han Dynasty which are the important data for the study of Mid-ancient Chinese language,aiming to sort out the verbs and analyze their lexical features and the syntactic behaviors.It is composed of six chapters.Chapter one is the literature background,covering the relevant studies on the verbs in Buddhist scriptures in Mid-ancient Chinese,commenting on the hot issues and the inadequacy in current studies.And then on this basis I define the contents,the data and the methodology of my study.It also points out the purpose and the significance of the topic.Chapter two presents an overview of the verbs in the 17 Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures in East Han Dynasty,with 2226 verbs analyzed,in which 37%are polysyllabic and 63%are polysyllabic.Among the disyllabic forms the coordinat ones are dominant.The word order of some new verbs is not fixed when they appears,there also exist many instances which have the same morpheme but different order.Meanwhile,the semantic meanings of the verbs are rich.For example,from the social action verbs all kinds of images can be reflected,such as the social life,production,labour,trade,disputes,reconciliation,wars,and so on.Chapter three deals with the detailed discussion of the relationship between the transitive verbs and their objects,with a focus on the hand action verbs.Actually,the syntactic behaviors of the hand action verbs without an object have no difference from those in the pre-Qin literature.The conceptual meaning of "chuanzhuo(穿着)"is chiefly conveyed by "zhuo(着),pi(披),fu(服),pifu(披服)".While the semantic meaning and syntactic behavior of mental verbs of fear(恐慌)changed,whose uses are much closer to those in the Tang and Song Dynasty literature.And the uages of the same verbs in the native literature in the same period are closer to those in the pre-qin literature.Chapter five makes a description and exloration the structures of the verbs with double objects.Thereinto,a large number of "give" verbs are the dominant type and their ditransitive constructions are very complicated with some special patterns together with the prototype.In chapter four,a systematic study is conducted on the speech act verbs.They are classified into 17 conceptual fields.And four types of the speech act verbs are emphasized and analyzed in great details,probing into the influence of the changes of the semantic features on the syntactic structures of the verbs.Comparatively,there are a small number of speech act verbs in the Buddhist scriptures translated by An Shigao,and the syntactic structures of these verbs is simple.Whereas the speech act verbs in the Buddhist scriptures translated by Zhi Chen manifest much more characteristics of oral Chinese language.And other translators of the Buddhist scriptures choose the classic Chinese verbs like "yue(曰)","yun(云)" or other options,this tendency is more prominent and clear in "Zhong Ben Qi Jing(中本起经)".Chapter six investigates the causative verbs and their constructions.The data indicate that there are rich expressions and construtions of the causative category in the scriptures in East Han Dynasty.There are three basic patterns of the causative construction,namely,the "shi(使)" type with the causitive meaning,the causative constructions with the causative verbs,the causative usage of some verbs and adjectives.Apart from these,there also exist some special causative structures.A careful discrimination is conducted on all the above causative constructions and patterns.Concluding remarks can be found in the last chapter.