The Development And Evolvement Of Absolute Adverbs From Modern Chinese To Contemporary Chinese

Degree adverbs often fall into two types: absolute adverbs and relative adverbs . The latter ones can only be used in comparative sentences. Many absolute adverbs evolve from Contemporary Chinese. The paper tries to explore the origins of absolute adverbs, analyses their similarities and differences in Modern and Contemporary Chinese, researches the relationships between their functions in Modern and Contemporary Chinese and goes further to deduce their evolution process.The research of degree adverbs was generally limited to Ancient and Cotemporary Chinese in the past. There are few articles combining the two ages to research the characteristics and usages of degree adverbs. Language has its inheritance and the present language usually develops on the basis of inheriting the past. Absolute adverbs whose number is not big, but use frequency is high , play a critical role in passing information and expressing emotions. It is of great use for the standardization and development of modern Chinese to study the development laws and usage features of absolute adverbs. So the paper tries to make a rough research about the evolution of absolute adverbs from Modern Chinese to Contemporary Chinese.The paper selects ten absolute degree adverbs, including over-degree, high-degree and low-degree. First, it analyzes their origins, similarities and differences in Modern and Contemporary Chinese. Second, it researches these adverbs evolution from Modern Chinese to Contemporary Chinese that can be observed from the inheritance and development of these adverbs. Third, it discusses the relationships between this research and the whole grammar research which has proven the simplification of Chinese development and analogy of grammarization and goes further to deduce the development tendency of absolute degree adverbs.