First steps towards establishing a special use of the paricle fu 夫 in Classical Chinese syntax: An analysis of the Hanfeizi 韩非 子
Abstrakt
Despite the prevailing academic opinion regarding the use of the particle fu 夫 in Classical Chinese syntax, this article proposes a new interpretation of fu 夫 as an introductory particle expressing a special kind of generalizing force that results in a shift of the truth-value of a sentence to a higher level. Based on a thorough text analysis of Han Feizi 韩非子 it represents the first steps in unveiling the rhetorical use of fu 夫 and its systemic application in dialectical reasoning.
By accounting for certain judgments of value made on an intuitive basis by a comparatively objective and consistent procedure, this paper hopes to shed new light on the characteristics of the special syntactic properties of Classical Chinese. This paper also represents the intuitive part of our investigation, forming an outline and laying a pattern for a following linguistic analysis.