The Adverb Cai On The Flower In The Mirror

Ming-Qing fictions are always important linguistic materials used to study modern Chinese linguistics. Through making a study of the works in different periods, we can find the evolution process of modern Chinese. The first draft of Flowers in The Mirrors was completed in 1815 posterior to The Scholars and A Dream of Red Mansions about 50 years and prior to The Young Heroes and Heroines' Story about 60 years. Thus the linguistic study of Flowers in The Mirrors can make us to understand the change of modern Chinese during that period, which has significance for study of the evolution of modern Chinese.In this dissertation, we pay attention to the semantic meaning of adverb such as Cai and their mutual relationships, describe their evolution direction and summarize the basic semantic meaning of the adverb Cai and its derivative semantic meaning. This dissertation focuses on the variety of semantic meanings and functions of the adverb Cai, a total of 717 sentences which contain adverb Cai in Flowers in The Mirrors are drew out and grouped under three categories: expression the subjective appraisal; expression the condition, the reason, the goal; expression the mood. Then the function of expression the subjective appraisal can be divided into expression time, extent and quantity; the function of expression the mood can be divided into the refuting mood and emphasis. Cai often expresses time relationship, logic causal relationship or conditions relationship.Through anglicizing all the sentences contains adverb Cai in Flowers in The Mirrors, the major conclusions are as following:In Chinese linguistic history, Cai kind of Adverbs such as Shi, Fang have a similar evolution process which firstly expresses time semantic meaning, and then were used to express continue semantic meaning. In the Flowers in the Mirrors Age, Cai represented ZhengZai Semantic meaning was fading, adverb Cai represented ongoing action as a feature of modern Chinese was dying out, and gradually substituted by ZhengZai. There were more adverb ZhengZai in Flowers in the Mirrors were used to represent ongoing action. Cai was arranged in pairs or groups with Zhi, Jiu, and You in Flowers in the Mirrors to express the instant connectivity of two actions, but the modern Chinese often choice Gang to match. In modern Chinese, adverb Cai has been partly replaced by Gang. In Flowers in The Mirrors, while Cai was used to express time, quantity or extent, usually measure word appeared in the sentence simultaneous; Furthermore, Cai often union jointed Shi or Hao etc appeared at the end of this sentence, Cai also can be bonded with the mood word to express emphasis, but in this instance, adverb Cai can not be extracted freely, the structure of CaiShi or CaiHao are fixed and the semantic meaning of CaiShi or CaiHao are fused.