Marriage Stories to Awaken the World is the important language material in modern Chinese period, its choice of words greatly reflects the language phenomena and laws of the middle and late period of modern Chinese. There are six complemented adverbs ...
Marriage Stories to Awaken the World is the important language material in modern Chinese period, its choice of words greatly reflects the language phenomena and laws of the middle and late period of modern Chinese. There are six complemented adverbs of degree “unusually, even, very(cruelly), extremely, severely, supremely” in Marriage Stories to Awaken the World. From the view of the ideographic function, the predicate-complement structures composed by the six complemented adverbs of degree do not mean the comparison, but the degree. The meanings that different adverbs represented are quite different, the expressions of “unusually, extremely, supremely” are higher than “even, very(cruelly), severely”. From a structural point of view, the use frequency of combinative complement is significantly higher than the adhesive complement. In most cases with complementizer “de”, the modified components are adjectives and psychological verbs. This paper studies the origin and development process of degree adverbs “extremely” and “very(cruelly)” used as the complement. Through the comparative analysis of the usage of “extremely” in different period, the paper summarizes the major features that degree adverbs used as complement in Marriage Stories to Awaken the World. (1) the usage that “extremely” used as complement is comparatively mature, the grammaticalized degree is high. Compared with the Zhuzi’s Language Category, Jinpingmei Cihua, the cases that “extremely” used as complement increase obviously, “extremely” has become the main complemented adverb of degree in Marriage Stories to Awaken the World, the grammatical function is more prominent, it lays a foundation for the continuous development of the “extremely” used as complement. (2)“extremely”not only inherits the structural form “AP+extremely(之極)” of ancient Chinese, but also appears the structural form “AP/VP+de(得/的)+extremely(極了)” and “AP/VP+extremely(極了)” of modern period. “AP/VP+de(得/的)+extremely(極了)” is a combinative structure, the structural particle “de”(得) and “de”(的) in the corpus can be regarded as a variant form of the same particle. In the structure, wether this particle “de”(得/的) appears or not, will not affect the semantics and syntactic structure, two structural forms can coexist. (3) Except the case of “AP+extremely(之 極)” in the corpus, the modal particle “le(了)” all appear behind the “extremely(極)”,the adhesive use of “extremely(極)” and “le(了)” is relatively fixed, and has become the important basis for the adhesive use of “extremely(極)” and “le(了)” in modern Chinese. The main features of degree adverbs “very/cruelly” used as complement in Marriage Stories to Awaken the World :(1)”very” and “cruelly” is at the beginning of the word differentiation, the development has shown the imbalance. Basically, adjective “very” has already weakened into degree adverb, while “cruelly” still remains the meaning of “cruel” as an adjective, and the frequence of use is very high. The part-of-speech of “very” is single, while “cruelly” can coexist as adjective and adverb of degree. (2) Because the adjective “cruel” moves backwards as complement, it promotes the “cruel” in the complement position along with the transition from the adjective to the degree adverb. The coexistence of adjective “cruel” as a complement and degree adverb “cruelly” as a complement is an important manifestation in this particular period of development. (3)In practical use, “very/cruelly” used as a complement is more dominant than it used as the adverbial, at this point, there are a large number of the same or similar degree adverbs coexisting. The development of the emerging adverb “very” is influenced and restricted by the degree adverb “even”, the use of adverbial is marginalized, so there are more use cases as complements.