Abstract:

In the spirit of new descriptivism, this paper makes a detailed analysis of the poem titled “Wuyi” in The Book of Songs in terms of syntax and semantics, claiming that archaic Chinese is more qualified as a verby language than modern Chinese. Many nouns, prepositions or adverbs in modern Chinese are verbs in archaic Chinese represented by The Book of Songs. In addition, conjoin played an important role in sentence-making in archaic Chinese and many serial verb constructions or subordinate structures （including verb-resultative constructions） in modern Chinese are probably verb conjoined constructions in archaic Chinese.

Key words: new descriptivism, archaic Chinese, verby language, conjoin, “nothing” （wu）, clitic