Zero-derived verbs (classical)¶
Bibliography
孟昭連, 之乎者也非口語論 (Nanking, 2017).
楊榮祥, ‘上古漢語「詞類活用」的本質與產生環境’, 華中國學, 6 (2016), 31–46.
袁仁林, 虛字說 (Sanyüan, 1746; repr. 1846).
In the classical language, verbs can be derived from other word classes with zero marking as a stylistic device.
Yüan (1746: 33) was the first to observe that such verbs cannot be understood when taken out of context. Meng (2017: 388) gives examples from the Tso chuan showing the variety of meanings these verbs can take on even in a single text.
Whether a derived verb became established in the language depends largely on the literary reputation of the author.
Warning
Much of previous scholarship, conveniently summarised in Yang (2016), builds on a misunderstanding of the term 'synthetic'. Synthetic(1) describes the fact that some grammatical category is realised morphologically.