Shi Psychological Verbs Semantic Grammar Study,

Psychological verbs refer to those verbs that can demonstrate one's psyche in one way or another. As a special and active member in the verb family, they have enjoyed a long history of development and evolution. The novels, written in the Wei, Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties, are marked by the elements of spoken language and therefore become the indication of the unique features of Chinese grammar, especially the knowledge of its vocabulary, in that historical period on the whole. Among the representative works in that period is The New Tao, which constitutes an important source of the corpus of the then Chinese language. This research tries to give a detailed analysis and description of all the psychological verbs in that literary piece within limits.The 128 psychological verbs actually take up 7.21% of the total verbs in the whole work. In order to make the semantic contents and grammatical features of these verbs clear, this research focuses on the comprehensive analysis of the original work from the semantic and grammatical points of view and also expects further studies of the related groups of verbs. The whole paper can be divided into three parts. The first part is the introduction of the present studies of psychological verbs while the second part is directed to the detailed analysis of the semantic contents of those verbs mentioned above. The third, and also the last part turns onto the grammatical analysis of the verbs.In part one, the researcher gives a brief description of the studies of psychological verbs in recent years and, based upon the definition of psychological verb given by Professor Fan Xiao and categories of the psychological process in psychological theories, classifies the 128 verbs as different categories. Part two concentrates on three points. Firstly it has observed the different levels of semantic contents of these verbs according to the number of meaning. Secondly the research has also made a contrast and analysis of the 12 synonymous pairs of psychological verbs in such perspectives as semantic, grammatical and pragmatic. Lastly this research has also approached the 39 pairs of psychological verbs functioning as juxtaposition and linkage by means of tracking down the sources of their collocating meaning and, furthermore, made a summary of their features and functions. Based on the analysis of the grammatical functions of the mentioned verbs, Part three focuses on the related changes of object when these verbs are, belonging to different sub-categories, employed in the position of predicate and the quantitative differences resulting from the adverbs of degree when they manage on modifying those psychological verbs. Accordingly it leads to the discovery of the main features of the psychological verbs from the grammatical and pragmatic points of view.