Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

2. General Remarks on Chinese Adverbs
Schniftfes~schn~: fisaqs in Honor of John &Francis
This is certainly no place to go into a detailed discussion of adverbs in Chinese.
What we would like to do in the following is to concentrate on some aspects that are of
immediate concern to our topic at hand. Specifically, we would like to take up two
import ant questions concerning Chinese adverbs, namely, (i) the problem of identifying
adverbs in Chinese; and, (ii) the placement of different types of adverbs in a multiple
adverbial construction.
2.1 The Problem of Identifying Chinese Adverbs
Just as in many other languages, the adverb in Chinese as a category is an
. extremely ill-defined cover term for a number of different categories. Tai (1976:393) calls
it "a wastebasket for a variety of linguistic entities which bear different semantic relations
to different parts of a sentence." This being the case, it is really difficult to set up criteria
to identify what adverbs are in Chinese. For instance, Guo (1962) defines an adverb as: "a
constituent that is placed before a verb or an adjective, but never before a noun to indicate
degree, scope, time, negation etc." Evidently, there is a catch in the definition in the form
of "etc.". But even with this vagueness, this definition excludes many linguistic entities
that other linguists would readily classify as adverbs. Witness (6) and (7).
(6) minexian-de, ta bu zhidao zhe-jian shi.
clearly he not know this-CL matter
'Clearly, he was not aware of the matter.'
(7) huaner-huan~-zhan~-zhan~ae ta pale jin-lai.
in:a:flurry he run-ASP enter-come
'In a flurry, he ran in (toward the speaker).'
Thus, mingxian-de 'clearly' and huanrr-huang-hane-zhang-de 'in a flurry' can both
occur before a noun, and yet most linguists would agree to assign them to the category of
adverbs.
However, rather than make any attempt to fix up the definition so that it can cover
all adverbs, which is a task evidently beyond the scope of this section, we would like to
take up an area which contributes to the difficulty of defining adverbs in Chinese. This
area, which has a great deal to do with the topic of the present paper, concerns the
ambivalence of some kinds of expression which occur preverbally.
Certain expressions in English also exhibit this ambivalence, as Lyons (1977:474)
points out:
The difference bet ween certain locative adverbials and place-referring
nominals is not, in fact, clear-cut in all syntactic positions in English.
For example, the demonstrative adverbs 'here' and 'there' and the
demonstrative pronouns 'this' and 'that' are equally appropriate as
substitutes for 'this placeV/'that place' in an utterance like (This/that
place is where we agreed to meet.'