Study On Verb Phrases' Unmarked Designation Following Behind Mental Verbs In Pre-medieval Chinese Language

This article makes use of theory of designation, making a survey of syntactic behavior of "mental verb+predicate object" in《Zuo Zhuan》,《Lun Yu》,《Meng Zi》,《Xun Zi》,《Han Fei Zi》,《Lv Shi Chun Qiu》。Also we compare the degree of designation of the verb phases followed by action verbs,mental verbs and modal verbs.Most of verb phrases are self-referentiality predicate structure followed by mental verbs in ancient Chinese. The proportion of unmarked self-referentiality predicate structure in total verb phrases designation is very high. On the other hand, transfer-referentiality predicate structure seldom appeared behind mental phrases. Not only the structure of the verb phrases is simple, but also the amount and type of the mental verbs are limited. In the marked designations, "所+VP" followed by mental verbs which extracted the object of the preposition. "所+VP" indicated the "object context" of the verbs.As for the internal parts of the mental verbs, the degrees of the designation of verb phrases followed by different mental verbs are not alike. We use "Factor of designation" reflecting the ability of mental verbs in controlling noun phrases or verb phrases. According to the sense of propriety of "Factor of designation", we separated the thirty-two mental verbs into three representatives.Controlling the verb phrases as same, "modal verbs+VP" is different from "action verbs/mental verbs+VP" in structural models. Modal verbs is not in the same level with VP and don't control VP directly. So VP hasn't designated. Although the VP behind mental verbs and action verbs have designated, the probability of transfer-referentiality of VP is high behind action verbs than in the mental verbs. And the structure and type of self-referentiality VP is simple behind action verbs. All these show that the degree of designation of verb phrases behind action verbs is higher than behind mental verbs.