Abstract
There is not much previous literature concerning Chinese adverbs and adverbials in general, and even less have been written about Chinese modal adverbs in particular. The present paper thus aims to thoroughly investigate the semantic content as well as the syntactic function in Mandarin Chinese.
The paper consists of five sections. Section 1 introduces the definition of modality and discusses the status of modal adverbs among Chinese modal expressions while Section 2 compares manner adverbs and modal adverbs with regard to their semantic content, morphological shape, syntactic category and grammatical distribution. Then Section 3 conducts a detailed comparison between modal verbs, adjectives and adverbs in terms of their syntactic function while Section 4 applies Travis’ (1988) theory of adverbs to the analysis and subclassification of Chinese adverbs. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the content and conclusion of the paper.
In our analysis, Chinese adverbs are mainly subclassified into speaker-oriented adverbs, epistemic adverbs, modal adverbs and manner adverbs, licensed by the head features of CP, IP, AGRsP and VP, respectively. This analysis, coupled both with the proposal that the scope of modification by adverbs be assigned through feature percolation and with the convention that while a given head feature may be contained in more than one head, the percolation of features cannot cross their paths, will naturally account for the linear order of Chinese adverbs; namely, speaker-oriented adverbs＜(＝precede) epistemic adverbs＜modal adverbs＜manner adverbs.
Keywords
modality, modal expressions, modal adverbs, modal verbs╱adjectives, the syntax of Chinese adverbs
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