an intransitive verb without an explicit or implicit and contextually determinate subject of any kind, definite or indefinite (e.g. yu3 雨 "it is raining")

Since the judgment that something is vi0 depends on an assessment whether a non-overt subject is or is not to be taken as "understood", there is an uncomfortable subjectivity in the judgment whether something is a subjectless word or not. For practical reasons, it is important to register all plausibe or even possible cases of subjectlessness in order to be prepared for a systematic investigation of the proper boundaries of the phenomenon.

Note that the common absence of an overt subject does not necessarily argue for the subjectlessness of verb. In the case ke3 可 "this is acceptable" the presence of pronominal subject is rare, and ***shi4 ke3 ye3 是可也 "such a thing is acceptable"*** is not a sentence we expect to find very commonly. Nonetheless, there is no sense in which ke3 可 places a feature "acceptability" in some location. On the contrary, it attaches this predicate to a subject. Thus the syntactic diagnose that something is an ordinary vi and not a v0 is in fact partly based on logical and semantic considerations - some might wish to stress "it is based on logical and semantic Western prejudice".

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Usage

• Lexical entries: 86

• Found 273 attributions

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Hypernym

• vi

Hyponym

• vi0.red
• vi0adN
• vi0adS