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A post-verbal aspectual particle in Classical Chinese: the supposed preposition hu1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

A. C. Graham
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Extract

Throughout most of pre-Han literature we find a particle hu which appears to occupy the same syntactic position as the directive preposition yü. Indeed, one particle often substitutes for the other in parallel passages.

‘The old and the weak are rolled into the gutters’ (of the dead in time of famine; the parallel in Me. 2B/4 has yü for hu).

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 314 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1978

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References

2 The Mo-tzŭ concordance has one instance of hu at the head of a phrase (Mo. 25/20), but the commentators from Pi Yüan (A.D. 1730–97) onwards have restored a preceding verb ts'un from the two parallel sentences (Mo. 25/18, 19).

3 Me. 2B/11.

4 Cikoski, John S., Classical Chinese word-classes, Yale University Ph.D. thesis, 1970, 54–71Google Scholar; idem, Introduction to Classical Chinese, teaching course, fall 1976, Dept. of Oriental Languages, University of California (Berkeley), 17–19 et passim; idem, ‘Three essays on Chinese grammar. Part 1’, forthcoming Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages, 8, 1978Google Scholar, not seen. Although it is generally plain enough whether a verb is ‘ergative’ or is ‘neutral’ (Cikoski (1976), called ‘direct’ in Cikoski (1970)), there are several complications.

(1) Some verbs are in some or all texts used only transitively or only intransitively. Cikoski classes these separately as ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’. A verb so identified on the basis of a sample may turn out to be neutral or ergative when further examples are found.

(2) Cikoski classes many possible verbs as ‘abstract nouns’, a very interesting category for which his criteria still seem to me unsatisfactory; I prefer to ignore it for the present.

(3) With verbs such as chih ‘arrive’ the directive particle yu is optional, allowing us to take it either as intransitive followed by the directive whether yü is present or not (Cikoski (1970), 66 f.) or as neutral with an object position which is sometimes unfilled (Cikoski (1976), 2); I choose the second alternative, although without any special conviction.

5 This graph is restored from the Ssŭ-pu Ts'ung-k'an edition.

6 See Exx. 83, 84, 100, 101, 103, 105, below.

7 cf. p. 315, above.

8 For the question of stress in the prosody of the ‘Songs’, of. Kennedy, George A., ‘Metrical “irregularity” in the Shih ching’, in Selected works of George A. Kennedy, ed. Li, Tien-yi, New Haven, 1964, 10–26.Google Scholar

9 cf. Graham, A. C., ‘The prosody of the sao poems in the Ch'u tz'ŭ’, Asia Major, NS, x, 2. 1963, 119–61.Google Scholar

10 Karlgren, B., ‘On the authenticity and nature of the Tso chuan’, Göoteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift, XXXIII, 1926, 3–65.Google Scholar

11 Lao-tzŭ stanzas 27, 63, in Ma-wang-tui Han mu pai-shu Lao-tzŭ , Peking, 1976, 74, 91.

12 See p. 318, n. 9.

13 The examples outside the ‘hu chapters’ are Mo. 8/7, 11/5 (the latter has the graph ).

14 Han-yü, yü-fa Iun-wen chi , Peking, 1955, 1–11.

15 Chung-kuo ku-tai yü-fa , part 2, Taipei, 1962, 248–51.

16 cf. p. 318 above.

17 I am indebted to Mr. P. C. T'ung for this sentence.

18 cf. Exx. 62, 77–9, 81 below.

19 cf. p. 321, above.

20 Cikoski (1970), 174, (1976), 86.

21 cf. pp. 325, 326, above.

22 cf. p. 339, below.

23 cf. p. 321, above.

24 As David Nivison has tentatively suggested to me. Tsai /*dz'ǝg and tsai /*tsǝg are cognate both phonetically and graphically (Karlgren, B., Grammata serica recensa, Stockholm, 1964, 943 i, v).Google Scholar In the bronze inscriptions the preposition tsai is distinguished from the verb by the graph , the same one which is used for the exclamatory particle (Dobson, W. A. C. H., Early archaic Chinese, Toronto, 1962, p. 36Google Scholar, n. 1, p. 61, n. 260). In the calendrical formula ‘the first day of the waxing/waning of the moon’, used of the 3rd and 16th days of the month in ‘Documents’, books 23, 42 (the former is one of the spurious books), the tsai is pre-verbal and inceptive, traditionally explained by skih ‘for the first time’. I leave open the question whether the pre-verbal tsai /*tsǝg of the ‘Songs’, phonetically and graphically related to both, is an inceptive-continuative particle.

25 Tso Hsiang 29/5, cited on p. 342 below.

26 Yüan-hu, Tso Hsiang 29/8; Cz. 13/61, 22/34; Liao-hu, Ha. ch. 5, Ch'en 67/4.

27 Tso Min 1, fu.

28 Tso Ch'eng 17/10, Chao 12/8, Ai 5/4.

29 Tso Hsiang 29/8.

30 (Chin yü 6) 009419. The Kuo yü concordance is computerized, with its quoted excerpts converted into strings of numbers; in the case of those with final hu, I have checked only those short enough to raise the suspicion that they might be initial phrases detached from their sentences.