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Принцип дистинктивных контекстов при анализе оппозиции имен и глаголов в качестве предикатов на материале китайского позднеклассического текста «Луньхэн» I в. н. э.
The article analyzes syntactic variations of presumably noun and verbal
lexemes functioning as predicates on the evidence of “Lunheng”, a Late Classical Chinese text from the I A. D. One of the basic criteria for differentiating the predicate
position is syntactic distribution, the other being the distinction context (DCon)
approach we have developed for this purpose. This approach relies on several DCon
criteria (special text components whose location near the targeted lexeme allows determining
its syntactic function within the context). Employing the DCon criteria
we have parsed over twenty-five thousand instances of certain targeted lexeme uses.
Their syntactic interpretation shows a critical difference in the total number of verb
and noun uses in the predicate position (93,68 % and 29,72 % respectively). Our analysis
also came up with a list of limitations on the compatibility of nouns and verbs
with certain DCon groups. This may indirectly indicate that the system of lexical categories
in Old Chinese cannot be characterized as exceptionally flexible. The meaning
of the lexeme also plays an important role. In particular, it was found that the lexemes
of some semantic classes (social roles, objects of nature, etc.) gradually lose
their ability to be used in a predicate position and in modern Chinese as they do not
occur in contexts that we have marked as predicate. Our statistical analysis indicates
a possibility of occasional intra-category shift. DCon statistics provide a broad picture
of the possible functions of nouns and verbs and reveal some critical differences
in their functioning in the Old Chinese language. Such statistical analysis can be extended
by analyses of other DCons with taking into consideration the historical processes
of grammaticalization, homonymy, as well as the processes of sign transformation
and replacement.