Abstract
There are two basic sentence forms in Pre-Qin Chinese, namely the verb-centered sentence and the topic-comment sentence. The verb-centered sentences are featured by a main verb with the pre-verbal participant semantically restricted by it. In the topic- comment sentences, no semantic restriction holds between the topic and the comment. Verbs are key to the formation of sentences, and yet verbs are not overtly marked in Pre-Qin Chinese. That is why the concept of 'temporal structure' is adopted to distinguish verbs from other categories such as nouns and adjectives. A verb indicates either the starting or ending point of an event, whereas a noun or an adjective is not related to this semantic notion. Li (1994) has made a complete study on Classical Chinese verbs, in which verbs are grouped into seven subcategories. Based on Li's study, how the verb in a verb-centered sentence instantiates certain semantic properties of the pre-verbal participant is investigated, and as a consequence, four types of preverbal participants, each corresponding to one or two types of verbs, are recognized. Thus the semantic restrictions between verb and pre-verbal participant are set forth. On the other hand, there is only loose semantic relationship between the topic and the comment. Nouns and adjectives are candidate for functioning as comment in a topic-comment sentence. A verb that does not instantiate its semantic salience at full scale and fails to impose semantic restriction upon the participant before it also serves as comment. In Pre-Qin Chinese, the complicated sentences are built by virtae of these two basic sentence formation principles, with or without additional conjunctions.