X-modern Chinese Adverbs

This dissertation aims to research the adverbs all with the phoneme of he. Based on the different word classes and meanings of contemporary Mandarin, we use the theory of Structuralism to analyze all this 11he adverbs, try to find out their functions and features, and compare differences between synonyms, and at the same time, we try to find out what makes these distinguishing features in a diachronic view.This paper is based on both of contemporary and ancient Mandarin; it has five parts in all. Chapter one introduces why we choose the topic, what and how to research it.Chapter two analyses the subjective degree adverbs of heqi and hedeng. This paper starts from the syntactic functions, analyses these two words features in rhythm, structure, expression and emotional overtones. The differences influenced by their grammaticalization processes. Heqi became as an adverb much earlier than hedeng, that's why heqi modifies single‐syllable word, and with a higher subjective degree and strong adverb characters, and more of derogatory sense, while hedeng is on the contrary.Chapter three analyses adverbs heceng and hechang, their grammatical functions are almost the same, but heceng used more in affirmative sentence, while hechang used in negative sentence more. And heceng could be used together with guo, which means heceng is a typically subjective time adverb. In term of their features, both of them could be used in question and exclamatory sentences, but their tense features depend on context. The third part lists their lexical process; their grammaticalization makes their features and differences.Chapter four researches four adverbs: hebu and hefang, heku and hebi. Firstly analyses their collocations and language environment, compares their common points and differences. Then finds out their features, at last discusses about these four adverbs'subjectivity, and comes to a conclusion that the word he is a subjective mark in contemporary Mandarin. Chapter five discusses all of adverbs he generally, as a whole, these eleven adverbs share few common points, such as they are all adverbial modifiers; they can be used in question sentence and so on. While the subcategories like subjective degree adverbs and persuasive adverbs share more common points, the reasons are the different grammaticalization degrees and the influence of the phoneme x.These eleven adverbs'usage frequencies are all different, some has a prosper future, while some may out of date. They have different grammaticalization processes, but their grammaticalization factors are similar, the subjective mark he will pose influence on more words and absorb them into the category of he, and maybe more relevant words may be grammaticalized in the future.At last is a summary and weak point of this thesis.