Syntactic and Morphological Features of the Denominative Verbs in Old Chinese (Warring States Period V B.C. and Later)

Abstract

The paper deals with some syntactic features of the denominative verbs 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’ / ‘to suffer from locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’ / ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (like a natural disaster) / ‘to thunder’. The article also proposes a primary classification of situations when there is a need to form a denominative verb. The lexemes are analyzed on the basis of the text corpus of the ancient Chinese period XI BC. – V AD. The nouns 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (as natural disaster) in the position of the predicate are not frequent, the percentage does not exceed 20%. For the first time appear in the pre-Han texts (5th century BC). There is a probability of some morphological process (the so-called latent morphology, phonetic-grammatical alternation within one word, not reflected in the writing), involved in the formation of denominatives, such as the reconstructed denominative suffix -s (䚃 – dǎo (*lhu̅́) meaning ‘path’, but dào (*lhu̅ʔ-s) means ‘to lead, to indicate’). Nevertheless, due to the lack of reliable information, this theory also needs further research. In fact, the denominatives 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘to suffer from locusts’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘to thunder’ are formed unmarked, neither phonetically nor morphologically, are intransitive monovalent verbs with similar semantic features.