Said Before "x"

The X in "before X" refers to the compositions which can form the time structure with "before". Modern Chinese Eight Hundred Word reduces the X in "before X" to "nouns(including quantifiers which signify time),verbs,clauses".This paper will furtherly convert "before X" into two parallel format:"before NP and "before VP". NP refers to a noun or phrase which has temporality, such as "before 1949," "before Spring Festival"; VP refers to verbs, verb phrases and clauses, such as:" before going"" before discovering the New World, ""before he was named section chief".When "before X" signifies time, Modern Chinese eight hundred word explains its whole semantic meaning as "noun+ before, referring to time. Before a moment or an event". We think this explanation is not comprehensive, the argument focuses on the word "before".We believe that sometimes the meaning of "before" in "before X" is not highlighted. For example, "If these descriptions are correct, thus before two thousand years, that is before Shan Hai Jing was composed to a book, Chinese had already investigated America Continent", here "before two thousand years " equals to "two thousand years",in the structure of "2 thousand years ago," the meaning of "before " is not obvious.Impacted by the other components of the sentence, when NP expresses time point, "before NP " can indicate either a point or a period; it is the same when NP expresses a period of time. This relates with the main verbs in the sentence."Before VP ", in addition to express the point of time and the period of time, can also show identity and complementarity with its negative form "before no VP ".The reason for the identity of two formats, you can get the amount of negative domain rules:When they have identity, the negative word "no" in "before no VP " can be seen as the redundant word. There are three performances of the complementarity of the two formats:First, the time it expresses has the difference between the point of time and the period of time; second, the main verbs in the sentence have the distinction of static and dynamic meaning, and between continuative meaning of time interval and time point; third,semantic focus, the former focuses on the objectively existed time, the latter focuseson the conditional meaning and contrastive meaning.Mr. Jiang Lansheng pointed out that "before no VP ", can be traced back to the Six Dynasties period of "do not suggest a prior" sentence. From the collected linguistic data, we can see that "before VP " and "before no VP" appeared before pre-Qin era.Making a general survey of the linguistic data from pre-Qin to Qing dynasty, when "before" uses after verbs and expresses time, the usage of it has two features:first, this usage had emerged in the pre-Qin era and grew rapidly during the period of the Tang Dynasty; second,on the process from the pre-Qin to qing, we found that most of the examples are negative form, the form is "before no VP ", that is the former form of" before no VP", the reason why "before no VP" used mostly is closely related with the words' two-syllablization.