An Exploration On The Chinese Character "de"(的) In The Story Guzhangjuechen

Huaben story is the earliest literary works in colloquial language, whose status in the research of grammar and glossary is inestimable. The huaben story Guzhangjuechen at the end of Ming Dynasty is confirmative in writing time and strong in spoken language. Taking this story as the corpus to study its usage, this thesis specifically investigates the syntactic function and structure as well as grammatical and semantic functions of the character"de"as a structural auxiliary approached from quantities statistic and static description. Meanwhile, this paper also analyzes the mood sense of"de"when used as a mood particle. Based on the above work, this dissertation makes a vertical and horizontal comparison of what has appeared in the corpus in order to restore the trace of language development.Through the research of Guzhangjuechen, we discover that the development of the structural auxiliary"de"has been consummated at the end of Ming Dynasty and"De"has substituted for"di"( the Chinese character底) , with the result that its six types of forms have appeared completely. At times"De"and"di"(the Chinese character地)have been mixed and cannot be distinguished strictly. What is more, the phrases made up of"de"are large, whose grammatical function is nominalization and whose semantic function is trans-reference.In addition to affirmation and emphasis, the mood sense of the modal particle"de"also shows the hypothetic mood in a few cases and the euphemistic mood in some structure-fixed sentences. During the period of Song and Yuan Dynasties,"de", as a modal particle, is not used with other ones. But at the end of Ming Dynasty, there appears a few sentences in which"de"is used together with other modal particles. There exist many sentences of"shi……de"pattern in the novel Guzhangjuechen. According to the classification of modern Chinese, we divide these sentences into three kinds and distinguish them approached from three angles.Besides"de"at the syntactic level, this thesis also analyzes the suffix"de"at the lexical level in the corpus where one case is that"de"is employed at the end of "duande"(端的) and"zende"(怎的) and the other case is that it is used in the special ancient Chinese sentence pattern"……de bianshi"(……的便是). As a matter of fact,"de"used after the appellative nouns is one kind of special suffix between subject and predicate with no real meaning.