A Study On The Adverbs Of The Pilgrim’s Progress

Missionaries’ works in the 1860 s used a large number of Chinese adverbs and example sentences with the characteristics of The Times,and in the transition period from modern Chinese to modern Chinese,they can reveal the development direction of Chinese adverbs.At present,the academic circle pays little attention to the lexical category of missionary works.The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin(1865)is a Christian religious novel translated in mandarin by William Chalmers Burn(1815-1868),a British missionary in China,in the late Qing Dynasty.This book mainly reflects the actual situation of The Beijing dialect in the 1860 s,which is a bridge from modern Chinese to contemporary Chinese.At the same time,the translator is a Chinese learner,and the comparison between the Chinese textbooks and grammar studies written by missionaries and the actual Chinese is helpful to the complete construction of the academic history of Chinese international education.The Pilgrim’s Progress conforms to the above two attributes and has a high value of language academic research.We starts with the author’s life and edition investigation of the Pilgrim’s Progress,summarizes the previous research results about it,and clarifies the reason and significance of the research.By establishing the textual database of the research corpus,240 adverbs were obtained and divided into 9 categories: degree adverbs,negative adverbs,temporal adverbs,modal adverbs,range adverbs,modality adverbs,frequency adverbs,cooperative adverbs and correlation adverbs.Make necessary and sufficient analysis and description of them,such as frequency of use,syntactic position,pragmatic collocation,etc.Through diachronic investigation and analysis,this paper combs the diachronic development of adverbs in the Pilgrim’s Progress,and takes typical adverbs as examples to describe the diachronic development.Thirteen new adverbs in the Pilgrim’s Progress are filtered out,and three evolutions of adverbs are summarized:one is that they have completely disappeared;Second,part of the retention,but some usage or semantic changes;Third,it is completely retained,with semantics and functions inherited up to now.We analyzes the continuous use of adverbs in the Pilgrim’s Progress,and summarizes the matrix table of adverb continuous use.Compared with the Chinese grammar written by missionaries,the adverbs in the Pilgrim’s Progress conform to the oral habits of Beijing dialect and the vocabulary used is idiomatic.