Syntactic Opposition for Nouns and Verbs as an Argument of a Clause in Late Classical Chinese Text Lunheng I A. D.

This article analyzes the syntactic features of presumably nominal and verbal lexemes in argument positions based on the material of a late classical text of the 1st century AD. “Lunheng”. The main proposed tool for syntactic analysis is a system of distinctive contexts (allow to determine the syntactic position of the lexeme under study). Such acriteriahelped to parse and analyze more than twenty-five thousand clauses. It appeared that there is a great frequency difference in the number of verb and noun lexemes encountered in given argument contexts (69.48% and 87.84%, respectively), there are also other differences in contexts’ frequency, conditions and restrictions of use. Potentially, these results may highlight some restrictions of free syntactic shift, and as a result indirectly indicate rigid flexibility of the system of categories in Old Chinese with a number of limitations.