Abstract
The chapter of the book focuses on the more general issue of word-class flexibility in Classical Chinese, and offeres, as a case study, an exhaustive analysis of possibly all cases of thing-denoting words being used to express a process in one of the more extensive compilations of Chinese antiquity. As a prerequisity, the study summarizes the new-brand theory of word classes and word-class conversion in the language proposed by the author in a separate monograph, and then goes on to test it again a text with special properties: Lǚshì Chūnqiū was conceived as an encyclopaedia of its kind, and therefore is rich and relatively balanced in lexicon, at the same time representing standard late Classical Chinese syntax of an essentially prosaic work.
The analysis shows the wide range of subtypes of noun-verb word-class flexibility and contributes to advancement of the working model by reassessing the previously designed system of patterns of derivation. Moreover, the exhaustiveness allows for at least basic statistical evaluation of the systemic role of such flexibility, leading to the conclusion that this phenomenon is usually grossly overestimated.