Abstract
Regardless of the actual views on the art of embellished speech of the author(s) presented the collection of essays known as Hánfēizǐ, the work is well known for its formal intricacy and refinement. Composition of several chapters appears unique in the context of other transmitted texts of the Warring States period, and the same is true of some textual strategies serving to convey the presented ideas with intensified rhetorical appeal.
In this study, I aim to identify one of these and to show on the basis of thorough textual analysis how the sections containing it are structured and how the given devices contribute to construction of meaning. Relevant parts of the chapters 45 (Guǐshǐ 詭使), 46 (Liùfǎn 六反) and 47 (Bāshuō 八說) are scrutinized here both with regard to their formal features, such as various arrangements of basic building blocks or transformations of metalinguistic formulae, and to their semantics, including the systematic lexical-semantic relationships of synonymy and antonymy.
Not only overt intervention by the author on the part of "correct" definitions of selected terms, but also the very inventory of the terms and deeper structural relationships and tensions reveal much about the author's intentions and opinions.