Modern Chinese Way Word Study

This paper, divided into five chapters excluding the preface and the conclusion, mainly discusses the modal words' position in the word class, its quality, scope, semantic category, selective restriction when used with verbs, semantic orientation and so on in modern Chinese.The first chapter mainly analyzes the modal words' position in the word class. It demonstrates the reasons for classifying the modal words into a new category through comparing them with adverbs, distinguishing words and adjectives which can only be used as adverbials and points out that both the modal words and the distinguishing words belong to the additional words of the single function and they have complementary distribution in the word class system in modern Chinese.Chapter two discusses the modal words' quality and scope. The modal words' grammatical character is nailed down after being observed synchronically their syntactic structures, combination and collocation. Their scope is defined according to their syntactic distribution criteria of being only used as adverbials and only modifying a part of verbs through comparing them with adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives and distinguishing words.The third chapter classifies the modal words into 11 kinds, which include mode, state, modal, will, gist, scope, order, strength, speed, time and quantity, according to their semantic relationship of high level and from the point of their semantic meanings.Chapter four analyzes the semantic orientation of the modal words from their semantic meaning, semantic oriental components, numbers of the semantic oriental components. From the points of its semantic meaning, the modal words includes the same semantic orientation and different semantic orientation ;From the semantic components it links , the modal words have four categories: oriental verb, oriental agent, oriental patient and oriental dative; From components number of semantic orientation, the modal words includes single orientation and plural orientation. It also points out that the modal words of different semantic categories have specific semantic features and other syntactic restrictions from the point of semantic orientation.The fifth chapter discusses the selective restriction between verbs and the modal words from the point of syllables and semantics. Generally speaking, double-syllable modal words collocate with double-syllable verbs while single-syllable modal words collocate with single-syllable verbs, which can be explained from the point of morphology syntax and prosody in which the selective restriction of verbs and the modal words of "lv²¹⁴ci⁵¹" are discussed emphatically. The selective restriction between the autonomous, non-autonomous verbs and the modal...