The Study On Verbs Grammar In "Muddled World"

"Muddled World" is a condemnation fiction written by the late-Qing dynasty writer Wu Wotiao who styled himself Yanren. The author described his experiences in the officialdom at that time as it is. The author hung together all the events and people in that time, by adopting the same passage formation style as it was used in the famous fiction "unofficial history of officialdom". The theme of this fiction is to reveal and accuse society, which really reproduces a mulled world at late Qing Dynasty..Verb is the most important part in a sentence, the other components being attached to it. In the past decade of years, plenty of experts and scholars have done some deep researches in the fields of verb classification, verb function and verb formation. However, there are insufficient researches on verbs just based on the data of specific fiction. This can be viewed as a weak aspect in the researches of the history of Chinese language. Therefore, the through and deep researches into the verbs in "Muddled World" will not only inspire the researches in other parts of speech and sentence structures, but also reveal the features of modern Chinese.In this paper, such data analysis methods are applied as statistics, classification, description and comparison. The current paper on the verbs in "Muddled World." can be divided into four chapters. The first chapter mainly analyzes the number and structures of verbs, both monosyllable verbs and polysyllable verbs being covered. In the second chapter, the verbs are carefully categorized into six types as action verb, force-border verb, psychological verb, modal verb, directional verb and other verbs. Each category has been briefly analyzed in terms of quantity and grammatical functions. The third chapter is mainly the semantic studies of the verbs by applying the comparison method from the following three aspects, comparisons between the several synonyms in "Muddle World", comparison with the modern Chinese and comparison with several groups of verbs in "Marriages to Awaken the World". The fourth chapter investigates the verbs of classical Chinese, Vernacular Chinese and even some verbs which are still used in modern Chinese. By researching into the verbs in the "Muddled World", we can sum up the conclusions as following. Firstly, there are 1062 verbs in "Muddled World", among which there are 425 monosyllable verbs, accounting for 42.02 % of total verbs, and 637 polysyllable verbs, accounting for 59.98%. As for the word formation, those polysyllable verbs mostly are compound words, and few of them are simple words. Among those compound words, compounding is the major form and very few are attachment type. Secondly, most verbs in "Muddled World" are the action verbs and few of them are force-border verb, psychological verb, modal verb, directional verb and other verbs. Thirdly, the synonyms in "Muddled World" differ in many ways, such as the patient role, style and degree of behavior. The same group of synonyms will differ in usage and emotional expression because of its pragmatic difference. Some verbs in "Muddled World" are no longer used in modern language. Although some verbs are still used, their meaning, part of speech, usage and word form have changed greatly. Lastly, classical Chinese verbs are seldom used in "Muddled World" and the first-appeared Vernacular Chinese verbs are also quite few. Most verbs in the novel are still used even in modern Chinese.