Study On The Adverbs Of Degree In WuDengHuiYuan

Buddhist anas are one kind of the most important materials for the research on the Old Mandarin Chinese. The main focus of our study is the use of different degrees of adverbs in one of the most important Buddhist documents as WuDengHuiYuan (五灯会元)The methodology of our investigation is to devide our study into three sections according by the three kinds of adverbs that we are going to look at.First, the use of adverbs that indicate strength,second,the use of the adverbs that indicate comparison, and finally the use of the adverbs that indicate weakness.Each section will be a comparison between the adverbs of degree appeared during ancient-mediaeval times and the ones appeared after the Tang Dynasty. The usage of adverbs will be study from the angle of their grammar functions.Even though the big amount of documents ,for our purpose we have selected the representative linguistic materials from the Tang,Song,Yuan,Ming dynasties, as our main reference to analyse the adverbs of degree in WuDengHuiYuan (五灯会元) and to outline the main track of the development of adverbs of degree since the Tang Dynasty.After our study,we find that the main feature of the adverbs of degree in WuDengHuiYuan (五灯会元) is: inheriting while developing, and the inheriting part more than the developing part.