Many grammatical issues of Archaic and Medieval Chinese still lack a comprehensive analysis. The book provides the first thorough investigation of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the linguistic categories tense and aspect and their relation with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese. The author uncovers fascinating details of a language with a highly restricted verbal morphology.

In this book, Professor Dobson has laid the foundations for a systematic and scientific study of the grammar of Classical Chinese. He has devised a system set up according to the canons of modern linguistic science – a system which is at once intrinsic to the language itself, one that makes possible a proper accounting for all of the data and does so with economy, and one which produces solutions which are repoduceable and predictable. This volume deals in detail with Late Archaic Chinese, the language of the classical texts of Mencius, Micius, Chung-Tzu and Tso-chuan. A total accounting is provided for all forms and particles occurring at this period. A feature of the description is that the analytical categories set up are based on levels and types of distribution, that is to say, that word and unitary classes are characterized by environmental, rather than by intrinsic, features. Thus the classes and categories recognized are directly observable in the material. In a language in which accidence plays no part, but in which grammatical values are environmentally imposed, such a system enables observation of a precise and predictable kind. Late Archaic Chinese has now, for the first time, been scientifically, comprehensively and precisely described. This book contains in addition to a grammatical description of Late Archaic Chinese, passages from Late Archaic authors (produced in Chinese characters and romanized script) with a complete grammatical analysis and translation, and a lexicon of grammatical particles in Late Archaic Chinese. This book will take its place among the standard sinological reference works but it will also be of interest to linguists for the contribution it makes to theoretical linguistics. Chinese characters used in printing the book were loaned by the Harvard Yenching Institute, Harvard, University.

The Laozi has been translated into Western languages hundreds of times over the past two hundred years. It has become the book of Chinese philosophy most widely appreciated for its philosophical depth and lyrical form. Nevertheless, very little attention has been paid to the way in which this book was read in China. This book introduces the reader to a highly sophisticated Chinese way of reading this Taoist classic, a way that differs greatly from the many translations of the Laozi available in the West. The most famous among the Chinese commentators on the Laozi—a man appreciated even by his opponents for the sheer brilliance of his analysis—is Wang Bi (226–249). Born into a short period of intellectual ferment and freedom after the collapse of the Han dynasty, this self-assured genius, in the short twenty-three years of his life, dashed off two of the most enduring works of Chinese philosophy, a commentary on the Laozi and another on the Book of Changes. By carefully reconstructing Wang Bi's Laozi text as well as his commentary, this book explores Wang Bi's craft as a scholarly commentator who is also a philosopher in his own right. By situating his work within the context of other competing commentaries and extracting their way of reading the Laozi, this book shows how the Laozi has been approached in many different ways, ranging from a philosophical underpinning for a particular theory of political rule to a guide to techniques of life-prolongation. Amidst his competitors, however, Wang Bi stands out through a literary and philosophical analysis of the Laozi that manages to "use the Laozi to explain the Laozi," rather than imposing an agenda on the text. Through a critical adaptation of several hundred years of commentaries on the classics, Wang Bi reaches a scholarly level in the art of understanding that is unmatched anywhere else in the world.