No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Observations On A New Classical Chinese Grammar1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
Extract
It is a surprising fact that the Chinesische Grammatik (1881) of G. v.d. Gabelentz remains the only grammar of Classical Chinese widely available in a Western language. Joseph L. M. Mullie's Grondbeginselen van de Chinese letterkundige taal is accessible only to those who read Flemish, and the Structural analysis of literary Chinese of H. E. Shadick and Hsin-min Wu has not yet appeared in printed form. The publication of this grammatical analysis of LAC (Late Archaic Chinese) by Professor Dobson, Head of the Department of East Asiatic Studies at Toronto, is therefore an event of great importance to sinologists and to linguists generally. Its object is to establish, on a purely formal basis, the grammar of the literary language of the fourth and third centuries B.C. For descriptive purposes this period is taken as a unity, ignoring the peculiarities of particular texts and the dialects which may underlie them. It excludes, not only the Early Archaic of the ‘Songs’ and ‘History’, but the Middle Archaic of the ‘Spring and autumn annals’ and the early ‘Analects’. Professor Dobson seeks to liberate the grammar of LAC from all the Western categories so far imposed on it (parts of speech, subject/predicate, subject/object, case, tense) and to establish, with the aid of a new and often alarming terminology, new categories distinguished by purely formal criteria.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , October 1959 , pp. 556 - 571
- Copyright
- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1959
References
page 556 note 2 Preliminary edition, Ithaca, 1950.
page 556 note 3 Following Dobson's practice, referenoes (for texts included in the series) are to the Harvard-Yenching Sinological Index Series. Abbreviation: SBTK—Syhbuh tsongkan 
page 556 note 4 Introduction, section (v.a).
page 557 note 1 Karlgren argued that originally wu was nominative and genitive, woo accusative (‘Leproto-chinois, langue flexionelle’, JA, xv, 1920, 205–33). Dobson's deseription has the advantage that it accounts for the frequeney of ‘nominative’ woo by postulating that the determinant wu cannot be exposed. For other attempts to establish a difference between wu and ‘nominative’ woo, ef. Hwu Shyh wentswen 
(first series), 2/15–22, and Kennedy, ‘A re-examination of the Classical pronoun-forms NGO and NGA’, Academia Sinica, XXVIII, 1956,. 275–82. None of these three articles appears in Dobson's bibliography.
page 557 note 2 Appendix 3. His table records 44 cases of eel, none of which (this is the crucial point) stands in the position of ‘affectee’ (object). But the Harvard-Yenching concordance (of course excluding entries for the Gongyang and Guuliang commentaries) records 75, of which 5 are object: 168/Wen 14/10, 203/Shiuan 15/2, 216/Cherng 2/fuh 2, 269/Shiang 10/1, 347/Jau 2/3. Two of these are in the position of inverted object, in which wu is also found. These exceptiong are not sufficient to overthrow his case.
page 558 note 1 ‘On the authenticity and nature of the Tso chuan’, Gōteborgs Hōgskolas Årsskrift, xxxii, 1926, 3–65.
page 558 note 2 §2.6.4.1. A footnote qualifies the ‘never’ by admitting ‘sporadic examples of earlier blunting’. For cases of possessive woo cf. Hvm Shyh, ut sup., 21.
page 558 note 3 In the Tzuoojuann, according to Dobson's table, there are 10 cases of nae (all in syntagma) and 49 of erl (13 as agent). The figures, although presented as though they were exhaustive, are evidently based on the selection in Fraser and Lockhar's Index to the Tso chuan. It is in any case hardly a practical proposition to separate the pronoun from the particle throughout the 50 pages of entries for erl in the Harvard-Yenching concordance. In the Fraser-Lockhart index (in which there is some confusion between the pronoun and the particle) I find only two cases of erl as agent of the main verb (658/2, 786/12). In other cases where it is agent it is in a subordinate clause: 678/11 
‘I know you are guiltless’; 687/11 
‘You have told me too late’.(Harvard-Yenching references: 389/Jau 15/fuh 3, 462/Dinq 14/5, 401/Jau 20/4, 406/Jau 21/fuh 2.)
page 559 note 1 3.8.
page 559 note 2 An aversion for case is perhaps also the reason for Dobson's insistence that suoo substitutes for the agent as well as the object (§6.6). His examples are 
‘that which is insufficient’, 
‘that which is difficult’. But could one read Classical Chinese at all if one thought that, for example, 
had an equal chance of meaning ‘he who hears’ or ‘that which he hears’?
page 559 note 3 cf. Gabelentz, ut sup., § 562–4.
page 559 note 4 Hannyeu yeufaa luennwen jyi 
(Peking, 1955), 181.
page 559 note 5 § 2.6.4.1, n. 15.
page 559 note 6 §§3.5.2, 3.8, 3.11.1.
page 559 note 7 Appendix 3. In fact before chyi the Tzuoojuann (from which Dobson's example is taken) uses the determinant wu 12 times, the pregnant woo nevěr (except for a Shyjing quotation, 318/Shiang 27/fuh 2). In the second person, however, it uses ruu three times and ed twice.
page 560 note 1 §3.11.1, n. 71.
page 560 note 2 § 3.3.2.1, n. 13. His case is complicated by insistence that aspect ‘is relative to the speaker and not to fixed points of time’ (§ 3.3.2.5, n. 18). But so is Indo-European tense, while aspect (indicating that action is continuous, completed, etc.) is not. The first two sentences of the Mohist canon (Mohtzyy, 68/42/15) to which he appeals for support would suggest rather that chiee and yii really are temporal particles; the last is too obscure to carry any weight. 
‘From beforehand we say “about to”, from afterwards we say “already”. What is so at present is also about to be (?)’. Dobson's translation (‘Though we say for an event in front of us “chiee”, and for an event behind us “yii”, in fact, the event of any given moment is an event about to be’) suggests that he takes tzyh (‘from’) as ‘self’, although tzyh is not a pronoun like jii 
but, in his own terminology, a ‘reflexi ve determinant of the verb’.
page 561 note 1 Juangtzyy, 6/2/81 f.
page 561 note 2 §3.3.2.
page 561 note 3 Harn Fei tzyy, SBTK, 4/6B/2f.
page 561 note 4 §§3.3.1.1, 4.8.1, n. 13.
page 562 note 1 Anakcts, 7/20.
page 562 note 2 Juangtzyy, 50/19/46–8.
page 562 note 3 Leushyh ckuenchiou, SBTK, 23/7A/3f.
page 562 note 4 Harn Fei tzyy, SBTK, 7/10A/6.
page 562 note 5 Mencius, 17/2B/13.
page 563 note 1 §3.3.1.3.
page 563 note 2 cf. Leu Shwushiang, ut sup., 12. Graham, A. C., ‘A possible fusion word: wuh = wu jy’ BSOAS, xiv, 1, 1952, 140. Dobson refers to the latter: ‘The verb is injunctive or hortatory when negated with wu 
*miwo (8) or with its stressed form wuh 
*miwd’ (§3.3.1.2). ‘The unstressed form does not occur in Mencius (see Graham (1))’ (n. 8). But that isn't what I said.Google Scholar
page 563 note 3 Leu Shwushiang, ut sup., 24–30.
page 563 note 4 ut sup., 30.
page 563 note 5 §3.5.3.1.
page 564 note 1 ‘The negation words fu and bu in pre-Han Chinese’, Yeuyan yanjiou 
1958, 3/1–23.
page 564 note 2 Dobson, § 3.3.1.1; introduction, section (v.b).
page 565 note 1 Particular texts show other classes of exception. The Tzuoojuann, which otherwise resembles the three texts analysed here in its use of fwu and vmh, shows two such elasses:
(a) 
‘he cannot last’ (six times). Here it is just possible to take jeou 
as transitive, ‘we can no longer expect him to last’.
(b) Fwu before kee 
followed by a verb (eleven times). If these are not exceptions to the rule that the verb after fwu is active and transitive, they are exceptions to the equally useful rule that the verb after kee is passive. The association of fwu with neng 
and kee may be important, since I háve the impression that it survives the obscuring of the distinction between fwu and bu during the Hann dynasty. This seems to connect with Karlgren's suggestion that ‘The negation adverb fut has a particular modal value in the Chou literatuře; it mostly means “cannot” or “will not” e.g. 
“The King would not listen”, 
“He could not vanquisb. [him]”’ (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, No. 23, 1951, 120).
page 565 note 2 Mohtzyy, 91/49/65. The text is corrupt (Mohtzyy shyanguu 
Basic Sinological Series, 299/11).
page 565 note 3 Mencius, 4A/13; Juangtzyy, 39/14/56, 63/23/59, 67/24/54; Mohtzyy, 88/49/6, 7. Several of these seem to me borderline cases, but Dobson would no doubt say the same of a few classed as transitive without object.
page 566 note 1 Borderline cases are more frequent here than in the preceding table, but I doubt whether any redistribution would greatly alter the proportions.
page 566 note 2 Ding Shengshuh argued that fwu combines the functions of bu and jy, but without suggesting phonetic fusion (which was proposed by Boodberg soon afterwards). Leu Shwushiang extended his argument to wuh in an artiele written in 1941; but he rejected the phonetic solution and suggested that fwu and wuh began as the stronger members of each pair and later ineorporated the function of jy. Being unaware of this essay until its inclusion in his Harmyeu yeufaa luennwen jyi (1955), I unwittingly repeated his investigation in 1952, accepting phonetic fusion tentatively, but explicitly confining myself to showing that the function of wuh combines those of wu and jy. Since Leu Shwushiang is, in the čase of wuh, the chief author of the theory which Dobson is attacking, it is difficult to understand Dobson's reference to his artiele: ‘The theory of an allegro form for fwu and wuh has been examined by Leu Shwushiang, who rejects it on historical and phonological grounds, suggesting that the difference is one of “different degrees of strength”’. (References as in Dobson, § 3.3.1.1, n. 6.)
page 566 note 3 Introduction, section (v.c).
page 566 note 4 §3.5.1, n. 51.
page 567 note 1 § 4.3.1.(a).
page 567 note 2 Introduction, section (v.c).
page 567 note 3 §4.1.
page 568 note 1 §3.4.6.
page 568 note 2 § 4.8.
page 568 note 3 § 3.2.1.
page 568 note 4 cf. Juangtzyy, 67/24/63; Tzuoojuann, 103/Shi 10/5, 131/Shi 28/5, 164/Wen 12/6.
page 568 note 5 § 3.4.8(4).
page 568 note 6 § 4.8.2.
page 569 note 1 § 3.4.8(5).
page 569 note 2 §4.3.1, n. 2.
page 569 note 3 § 3.4.8(5). Dobson translates: ‘Being something that nothing can resist, not to be humane is folly’.
page 569 note 4 § 4.6.
page 569 note 5 Yang Borjiunn 
goes so far as to take a single example of buh ru in the sense of ‘not like’ (without implication of degree) as evidence of the latě date of Liehtzyy (Liehlzyy jyishyh Shanghai, 1958, 238–42).
page 570 note 1 § 4.6, n. 8.
page 570 note 2 As Dobson himself observes, § 4.13.
page 570 note 3 §4.3.2, n. 3.
page 570 note 4 § 3.12, n. 74. The bibliography does not include the main Western contribution to this question: Simon, W., ‘Die Bedeutung der Finalpartikel 
’, Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen, xxxvn, 1, 1934, 143–68.Google Scholar
page 570 note 5 § 4.2.
page 570 note 6 §4.3.1(d).
page 570 note 7 §8.11.12.