Denominal verbs in Old Chinese

It is very common to see that some nouns surface as verbs in Old Chinese. These kinds of nouns are sources of both Chinese denominal verbs and multi-category words. This article systemically analyses denominal verbs in Old Chinese. Being a quantitative study, we classify 21 classic documents1 according to two criteria: 1) depending on their syntactic distributions, their syntactic characteristics are summarized and 2) generalization of their categories according to the semantic roles of the origin nouns. In addition, this research is conducted from the perspective of language typology. By comparing denominal verbs in Old Chinese, Modern Chinese and the English language, we discover the typological sense of Old Chinese denominal verbs.