A Study Of Manner Adverbial In Chinese

This paper attempts to make a systematical study on the Chinese manner adverbial. It consists of 14 chapters as follows:Chapter 1: An elaborate study of the attribute, types of manner, and their relationship with associated categories. And then it formulates its final topic: the manner adverbial.Chapter 2: . It advocates two criterions for the division of the Chinese manner adverbial development periods. Accordingly the development of the manner adverbial can be divided into three periods: Pre-Qin Period to Xihan Dynasty, Donghan Dynasty to Song Dynasty and Yuan Dynasty to Qing Dynasty. The contemporary Chinese manner adverbial is the development of the modern Chinese.Chapter 3: During the period from Pre-Qin Period to Xihan Dynasty, the distinct characteristics of the manner adverbial is: the corresponding order of the "yi" (以) -phrase and VP is unfixed.The manner adverbial can be made up of by many components such as noun, which is the most capable one to form the manner adverbial directly, and "yi" (以) -phrase, which is the most capable prepositional phrase to act as the manner adverbial. And these kinds of the manner adverbial forms are comparatively abbreviated. The position of the manner adverbial in the sentence is gradually moving to the front of the VP during the development process.Chapter 4: During the period from Donghan Dynasty to Song Dynasty, the distinct characteristics of the manner adverbial are: the position of the "yi" (以) -phrase in the sentence is comparatively stable;And the grammatical mark and subjectivized format of adverbial are not fully developed. Until the Donghan Dynasty, the postpositional prepositional phrase ultimately moves to the front of the VP. And till the Song Dynasty, the grammatical degree of adverbial mark and the subjectivized degree are not high enough. Also, the structure of the manner adverbial changes little.Chapter 5: During the period from Yuan Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, the distinct characteristics of the manner adverbial are: the grammatical mark "de " (""地/的") of adverbial are fully developed and widely used. And Subjectivized reduplicative structure, symmetrical structure and semantic multi-reference of the manner adverbial are used very often. The maturation of the grammatical mark signifies the end of the grammatical process of the manner adverbial. Reduplicative structure and symmetrical structure are greatly used as the manner adverbial. SP structure often serves as the manner adverbial. And figurative structure has developed into a complete figurative mode.All in all, the development of the Chinese manner adverbial is a procedure of fixing on the position of the manner adverbial in the sentence, the maturation of the grammatical mark and the development and enrichment of the components of the subjectivized format.Chapter 6: The development of the position of the manner adverbial in the sentence has its synchronic procedure and intrinsic motive. During the period from Pre-Qin period to Xihan Dynasty, there are two manner adverbial orders: (1) non-prepositional phrases are to be preposed;(2) the order of the prepositional phrases is unfixed. In the preposed "yi" (以) -phrase, the "Xyi (IjJl) ? VP" structure can be regarded as the transitional form of the fronting process of the"VP ? \cX X" structure.With the development of the principle of temporal sequence, the postposed prepositional phrases are gradually moving to the front part of the sentence. However, the subjectivity also affects.Chapter 7: The contemporary Chinese manner adverbial is generally a development out of that of the Ming and Qing Dynasty. However, the richness of the components, the diversity of the semantics and the flexibility of the transferring etc. have greatly exceeded that of the Ming and Qing Dynasty.Chapter 8: The manner adverbials made up of by the Subject-Predication structure have many distinguishing features. They are totally different from the other manner adverbial in form, grammatical attribute, semantic relationship, cognition and information characteristics etc.Chapter 9: The manner adverbial and the predicate have a close relationship, which are mainly shown as follows: some verbs show a state of verb or preposition in the process of grammaticalization;some structures show a state of predicate or adverbial;the adverbial mark "de" (ift) makes the transformation between the adverbial and predicate.However the transformation of the manner adverbial and predicate is restricted by the structure and semantics. The profound reason of the structure being restricted is the restriction of the semantic aspect. When transformed to be a predicate, the manner adverbial differs in the syntactic function, syntactic semantics, information features and cognitive schema.Chapter 10.11.12: Some of the manner adverbials have very close relationship with complement, attribute and referential object. Some manner adverbials can be transformed to complement and attribute;and the referential manner adverbial can sometimes be transformed to object. The transformation is restricted by the structure and the semantics. And the transformed pattern shows differences.Chapter 13: The intrinsic meaning of the manner adverbial can indicate the attribute, state, action, affiliated events, manner or modality and so on. Manner adverbials which are constructed by coordinate structure show multiple meaning. And the multiple manner adverbials may have somesemantic relation. There are four semantic functions: descriptive function, declarative function, critical function and referential function. And the semantic references are mainly: uni-reference, bi-reference, tri-reference, and co-referentiality or multi-referentiality of the multi-manner adverbial.Chapter 14: The semantics of the manner adverbial is objective as well as subjective. The objectivity and subjectivity of the words' or phrases lie on their syntactic and semantic relation with other words in the sentence.The manner adverbial has very strong subjectivity, and there are some subjective syntactic forms of the manner adverbial. They are mainly: adverbial mark "de" (ife) , reduplicative structure, symmetrical structure and figurative structure. Besides, there are other subjectived expressions such as metaphor, and the direct speeches.To sum up, this paper has mainly done the following researches: fix the attribute of the manner category;advocate the division criterion of the synchronic development of the manner adverbial and the development phases of the manner adverbial;an elaborate research into the features, components, semantics and development of the manner adverbial in different phases;also discussed is the motive of the development of the manner adverbial order in the sentence and it was believed that there is a transitional form in the process of the development;in the following parts, a detailed research into the structure, function, semantic feature and semantic relation etc. of the modern Chinese manner adverbial. And an analysis of the transformation and its restriction and the differences made after the transformation between the manner adverbial and predicate, supplement, attribute, object etc. Also discussed is the objectivity and subjectivity of the manner adverbial semantics and the grammatical format of the manner adverbial subjectivization.