EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Linguistics 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 20 Kolpachkova Elena (Saint Petersburg State University) Verb Grammatical Categories Interaction in Mandarin Chinese Key words: Mandarin Chinese, grammar, grammatical category, aspect, tense, mood The article provides our research findings from the recent large-scale typological study of the interaction between grammatical categories and/or with lexical-semantic features of verbs. Only a few verbal categories in Mandarin Chinese can be expressed autonomously, regularly they are conflated with another grammatical category, including aspect, tense, or mood. Some of them are frequently not expressed grammatically, but using lexical means. Aspect in Mandarin Chinese is neither prescriptive nor obligatory and the concept of tense is usually expressed by temporal adverbials or a clause to indicate time reference. Verbal suffuxes 了 — le, 过 —guo, 着 — zhe not only contribute to an aspectual meaning of the sentence but also can behave like a relative tense marker, but the usage of them is irregular and optional, as well as the usage of serial verb construc- tions that can be functionally equivalent to the aspect markers. The meaning of the sentence depends on the speaker's intent and can only be understood in context. Through the analyses of the formation, meaning and distribution (both typical and marginal) we argue that grammatical categories in Mandarin Chinese can only be expressed on a clausal level, an effect of temporal adverbials on a meaning of the whole sentence should be taken into consideration. A number of semantically diverse particles and auxiliaries that serve to express verbal aspect, tense and to some extent mood shows no paradigmatic uniformity. Kravchuk Alexandr (FEFU) The Instant Primer (“ 急就篇 ”). Analysis of the Chapter of Music ( 乐器部 ) Key words: The Instant Primer; traditional Chinese lexicography, Old Chinese lists of hieroglyphs, Old Chinese samples of writing; ancient chinese textbooks “The Instant Primer” in the general sense do not fall into the same category as wordbooks and diction- aries, but character primer in the history of Chinese civilization shares quite a number of the features of a wordbook or a dictionary. “The Instant Primer” is a textbook for primary education, which was composed by high official Shi Yu 史游 in the 1st century BC at the end of the Western Han Dynasty, during the reign of the Emperor Yuan Di (48–33 BC.). It occupies an important place in the history of education and traditional Chinese lexicography and had a great influence on following form of textbooks. Compilation of such primers was difficult undertaking. There are a number of textbooks for primary education, relating to different periods, that were used in China, the most important ones are: “Historian Zhou’s Primer”», “The Cangjie Primer” before appearance “The Instant Primer” and “The Three-Character Primer”, “One Thousand words primer”, “The Book of Family Names”, “Primary education” after “The Instant Primer”. Primers comprise many linguistic elements and the number of characters of texts ranges from hundreds to thousands. Corresponding to the requirements of epoch, the character primer should satisfy three conditions: the first is the sphere of ideals and thoughts. Textbook should reflect the political course and ethical concept of the ruling class of the time. Secondly, from the material side, it should include the basic lexical formation of society of the time, and, at the same time, should not exceed the generally accepted level of intellectual capacity of the child. Thirdly, the style of writing should be lofty and understood generally at the same time and the rhyme should be natural for quick learning. “The Instant Primer” is a list of 2016 characters without interpretation of meanings, distributed by subject. It consists of a trisyllabic, septisyllabic and quadrisyllabic rhyming lines.The lexical material is divided into classes (“The Ready Guide”).