Fractions in the Suàn Shù Shū (China, beginning of the 2nd century BCE)
西汉出土文献《算数书》分数表达
Rémi Anicotte
Abstract 摘要
The Suàn Shù Shū contains 301 instances of regular expressions for fractions. They can be “mono-dimensional” (formed with one integer name only) for unit fractions, “bidimensional” (with two integer names) for both unit and non-unit fractions, or lexicalized only for 1/3, 1/2 and 2/3. The present paper gives a complete description of the diversity of these forms. Bidimensional expressions are predicative phrases: the name n fēn of a unit fraction 1/n acts as subject and the numerator’s name as predicate; according to the syntactic context, the morpheme zhī can be used as an optional marker of this predicative relation.
Keywords 关键词
Chinese historical syntax 中文语法历史 Fractions 分数 Numerical expressions 表数短语
Separable semantic units 离合词组 Measure words 量词 Suàn Shù Shū 《算数书》
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.45, no.1 (June 2017): 21-67
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