Syntactic function vt0oN
subjectless transitive verb without a contextually determinate subject, (e.g. yu3 雨 in 冬十月，雨雪 "In the winter (of 704 BC) it rained snow> snowed." It is implausible to think that this was sludge. The striking phenomenon to record was snow, and there is no grammatical or logical subject envisaged.)
This is has aroused much discussion, and certainly this category needs to be carefully distinguished from that of intransitive simply feature-placing verbs like vi0. If there is a subject in such cases, it is never xue3 雪 "snow", but occasionally (as in LS 21.1.2) tia1n 天 "the sky; Heaven". Similarly we have 建武三十一年中，陳留雨穀 "A.D. 55 it rained grain in Che2n Liu2", and the current subject for this phrase is again tia1n 天 "the sky; Heaven". Thus the current 天雨穀 should probably be interpreted causatively with an embedded subjectless verb: "Heaven caused it to rain grain". The causative can be made explicit, as in: 使雨雪甚 "they caused it to snow hard." (LS 21.1.2.5)
Usage
- Lexical entries:
- Found 123 attributions