On The Structures With Chinese Character "de" In Modern Chinese

The paper studies the phenomena relating to "de" centering on its neutral tone in modem Chinese. We attempt to acquire more comprehensive knowledge on the structures with "de" by comparing their syntactic relationships, semantic location and formal variations.The paper briefly relates the historical evolution of Chinese Character "de" which developed from notional word to function word, and the emergence and development of the three structures "V+ de", "V+ de+ complement", "V+ de+ object". And interprets that as a modal verb, "de" in structure "V+ del bu de" is the complement, while in structure "del bu de+ V" is the predicate.The paper separately analyzes and expounds the structures with "de" which are classified into verb-complement structure and verb-object structure. We give a brief description of the verb-complement structures on the one hand, explain various kinds of the phenomena that "de" precedes an object on the other hand. At the same time, we introduce the term "object complement" to analyze the structure "V+ de+ N+ VP", to explain the characters of the structure in a more integrative way.After surveying all the structures with "de", we hold that there are three different "de" in modern Chinese, they are auxiliary verb, auxiliary word and affix.