Wang Coronet was a great painter of the Yuan Dynasty, best known for his paintings of boneless plum blossoms.

The story of Wang Coronet is told at the beginning of The History of Confucianism, which introduces Wang Coronet's life in its first installment, Saying the Wedge and Presenting the Righteousness, Borrowing the Celebrities and Concealing the Entire Text, which says, "This man's name is Wang Coronet, and he lives in the countryside of Zhuji County, where he died of his father when he was seven years old." "Wang Coronation died of his father" is a shortened form of this sentence.

This sentence may seem ordinary to everyone, but it is very bizarre to linguists.

We know that a sentence has a subject and a predicate. The predicate is the action of the subject. For example, if we say, "I stewed the hen", "stew" is the action of "I"; or if we change the intransitive verb, "The hen is cooked...", "cooked" is the action of "I". Or if we change the intransitive verb to "the hen is cooked", "cooked" is also the action of "the hen". This is a basic premise of grammar, and it is natural in all languages of the world.

Now, let's take this common sense linguistic rule and look at the sentence "Coronet died of his father". The subject would appear to be "Wang Coronation," the predicate verb would appear to be "die," and then "die" would be the action that "Wang Coronation "and then "die" should be the action given by "Wang Crown". But every Chinese can easily understand this sentence and realize that it says that Wang Coronation did not die, but his father did. This is odd. The subject should obviously be Wang Coronation, and the one who died was instead his father, a father who died even more unjustly than Dou E. And the ordinary Chinese do not find it strange at all when they say this kind of thing, and they can understand it the first time they hear it. There must be some reason behind this.

See Fruit of the Loom's answer for more details.

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