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4.2 “Class cleavage”

“Class cleavage” is the odd term that describes the situation where a word ordinarily used
in one grammatical category may be appropriated for use in another. WYW is ideally
constructed for class cleavage because words are uninflected; that is, their grammatical
function is not indicated by such features as prefixes, suffixes, or phonetic markers, as in
Indo-European languages. Hence, where in English, class migration of a word like “take”
may create no ambiguity (e.g., the verb form “take” and the noun form “taking” are
distinguished by suffix), the same is not true in WYW (see d. below). On the other hand,
WYW-style class cleavage is becoming more common in English – as in, “The wonder is
that WYW can impact English long-distance. Cool!”

We will consider four ways in which words exemplify class cleavage.

a. Sometimes one word/graph is regularly employed in two closely related senses that
differ chiefly in terms of syntactic function. In such cases, dictionaries will generally give
the graph multiple definitions, according to its different grammatical functions. For
example, the word zăi 宰, which means “steward,” or “chief-of-staff” in our passage,
may equally well be used as a verb meaning “to be in charge of”; “to supervise.”
Dictionaries will routinely note that 宰 may serve as a noun or as a verb, but in terms of
its textual usage, there is no marker of this distinction other than context.

b. Sometimes the same graph is used to denote closely related words, as in “a.”, but the
two uses will be distinguished phonetically, marking them as fully independent words.
For example, the word shǐ 使 in our passage in used in a coverbal sense, “to make
[someone do something]” (we could also render it as the full verb “to depute”).
Elsewhere, however, the same graph denotes the noun shì: “a deputy, an emissary.” Here,
the difference in word class is marked in the spoken but not the written language.

c. Sometimes a cleavage in syntactical function may become so regular that the
difference is marked by the introduction of a new graphemic element to correspond to
one of the usages. For example, the word dì 弟: little brother, also possessed a verbal (or
stative verb) sense of “to behave like a little brother should.” Objectionable as that notion
may have been to little brothers, this verbal usage came to be marked by both a phonetic
distinction (it is pronounced tì) and by a graphemic addition: the heart element was added
to it to create the graph 悌. Many cognate words that share phonetic graph elements and
semantic properties evolved through class cleavage in this way.

d. Class cleavage is most challenging to WYW readers (and also often most rhetorically
powerful) when a word regularly used in one syntactical manner is used in another word
category without the precedent of regular class cleavage. Take this example from the
present text:
君有取謂之取
jun yǒu qǔ wèi zhi qǔ
When a ruler has a ‘taking’ we term it ‘to take.’