The Constituents That Can Be Both Adverbial And Complement Of The Same Verb In Modern Chinese

Word order plays the most essential role in Chinese grammar. This paper focuses on the constituents that can function as both pre-verbal adverbial and post-verbal complement of the same verb in modern Chinese. We start with the investigation of the three groups of constituents: those that can serve only as adverbials, those only as complements and those that can serve both as adverbials and complements. The paper analyzes the essence of the three groups of constituents on the basis of their semantic relations to the relevant verbs/predicates; and thus explains their difference in distribution. Specifically, the paper proposes that the crucial difference between pre-verbal adverbials and post-verbal complements is that the whether the state represented by the relevant constituents affects the procedure of activity.The paper also investigate the historical development of suffix "-de" and the "-de" complements and some other related issues...