A Study On Modal Adverbs In Modern Chinese

In this paper, I discussed the modal adverb of Chinese adverb. I focused on three problems:the criterions of modal adverb, the subclasses of modal adverbs and the co-occurrence of modal adverbs.In the past, the criterions of modal adverb were inconsistent, and were lack of operability and quantitative method. The pertinence of some syntactic criterions was not very strong, and the effect of them was not very satisfying. Considering these unsolved problems, I gave some new syntactic criterions to judge modal adverbs. According to Yuan Yulin etc. (2009), I made a scale to judge whether an adverb is a modal adverb or not.In this paper, the modal adverbs were divided into speaker-oriented and subject-oriented first. Then, the speaker-oriented modal adverbs were divided into two subclasses:epistemic modal adverbs and deontic modal adverbs.The co-occurrence of modal adverbs was also very important, and was discussed very much in many documents. After researching corpuses of Modern Chinese, I found that speaker-oriented modal adverbs always precede subject-oriented modal adverbs when they co-occur in the same sentence. When epistemic modal adverbs and deontic modal adverbs co-occur in the same sentence, epistemic modal adverbs always precede deontic modal adverbs.