Michael V. Kryukov

Institute of Russian Studies, Tamkang University

    The immediate purpose of the present article is to substantiate the view that sentences found in the Yin oracle bone inscriptions can be analyzed from two different perspectives. First, all of them have their formal structure according to which such parts as subject, predicate, object etc. are to be isolated; second, some of the sentences display a sort of informational structure including "theme" and "core" of a given piece of communication. Oracle bone inscriptions were essentially intended for inquiry on whether some supposed actions corresponded to the will of the Heaven. They were normally started with a question of general nature which afterwards was expressed in a more concrete way as regards persons, time, place etc. involved. To deal with the latter the priest had no other means except using questions with the core of communication emphasized; this is the reason why so many sentences with explicit informational structure can be found in these inscriptions. From grammatical point of view sentences with or without such a focus have some basic distinctions, word order and the rules of omission being the most obvious ones. To the present authors' mind, a profound investigation into informational structure of Yin oracle bone inscriptions not only is very useful for grasping their contents but is also of importance for studies of diachronic dimensions of ancient Chinese as a whole.