The Study Of Presence&Absence Of Time Adverbs In Modern Chinese

The time adverb is a big subcategory in Modern Chinese. According to the research made by Jianming Lu and Zhen Ma in1999, there are about130time adverbs in Modern Chinese, almost account for30percent of all adverbs. The basic function of time adverbs is to modify verbs and adjectives, indicating the time of occurring, changing or lasting of the events, actions or states. Besides, some of the time adverb can modify nouns, quantifiable phrases or the whole sentences. To any language, time concept is definitely a quite important category, but different languages always have different ways to express the meaning of time. In the languages of the Indo-European language family, verb’s inflections are often used to indicate the changes of tense and aspect. However, as Chinese is an analytic language, it has a variety of ways to express the meaning of time, mainly contains nouns of time, adverbs of time, dynamic auxiliaries and modal words. In discourse, they can be used alone, or used with the others. What’s more, the adverb of time is very a important way to express time meaning in Modern Chinese, in addition to that, it also have functions such as making a sentence complete, relevance and so on. This article regards the grammar views of three-dimensional theory as the foothold and discusses the presence&absence of adverbs of time and its restricting factors. After a systematical study about some commonly used adverbs of time, the author finds that the presence&absence of adverbs of time can be divided into three types:1.The adverb of time must be present in the sentence, if not, the sentence will become wrong;2. The adverb of time can be present or absence, that is, regardless of presenting and absenting, the expression and comprehension of the sentence will not change;3.The adverb of time’s presence and absence have different effects to the sentence, in other words, if the adverb of time absent,the sentence will go through some changes. To explain these types, we must consider factors including syntax, semantic and pragmatic. But in sentences, the presence&absence of adverbs of time is often restricted by varied factors rather than only one of them.