The Study Of Degree Adverb In Guan Hanqing’s Drama

Yuan drama is an important literary form, following the poetry of Tang Dynasty and Song Poem. Among those Yuan dramas, Guan Hanqing’s productions represent the highest achievement, which have the most preserved amount and the most widely circulation. In addition, Yuan drama was popular from folk and kept the most original spoken language characteristicof Yuan dynasty, therefore, the study of Yuan drama, especially of Guan Hanqing’s dramas, is an important part of the study of modern Chinese. However, so far no systematic research about the degree adverb in Guan Hanqing productions are available, hence, it has significant academic meaning to study degree adverb in Guan Hanqingproductions.This article has the following five parts: The first part is introduction. First of all, the corpus value and research status of Guan Hanqing’sdrama is mentioned, from which the important corpus value and the meaning of the research will be analysed. Then, the degree adverb will be discussed, including the definition and categories of the degree adverb. The last is the version selection and research methodology of Guan Hanqing’drama to prove the feasibility of this article.The second part is the essential part, which is the category of degree adverb in Guan Hanqing’s drama. Based on different meanings of these adverbs,they are classified as extreme, excessive, over extreme, tiny extreme, gradual extreme and comparison. It is discussed that how they can be used in Guan Hanqing’s drama, including composition, modifier, statistics and so on.The third part is the origins of degree adverb in Guan’s drama and the category of the origins. The categories are following: grammaticalization,analogical mechanism, words combination, attachment type,phonetic loan and popular form of characters.The fourth part is degree adverb modifying nouns. From the definition of adverb, it cannot modify nouns. But it is found in Guan’s drama.Therefore, it is discussed that the condition of modifying nouns is when noun is the verb of the sentence.The fifth part is the summery of the usage of degree adverb, containing the analyses about number of times and frequency of usage,syllabic features,architectural feature and the combination function.Through the above study, it is hoped that the usage system of degree adverb in Guan’s drama could be established, providing research data for modern Chinese study.