Standard and Non-standard Adverbial Markers: a Diachronic Analysis in M odern C hinese Literature (2023)

Abstract: This paper investigates the use of standard and non-standard adverbial markers in modern Chinese literature. In Chinese, adverbials can be derived from many adjectives, adverbs and verbs with the suffix “de”. The suffix has a standard and a non-standard written form, both of which are frequently used. Contrastive research on these two competing forms has mostly been qualitative or limited to small text samples. In this first large-scale quantitative study, we present statistics on 346 adverbial types from an 8-million-character text corpus drawn from Chinese literature in the 20th century. We present a semantic analysis of the verbs modified by adverbs with standard and non-standard markers, and a chronological analysis of marker choice among six prominent modern Chinese authors. We show that the non-standard form is more frequently used when the adverbial modifies an emotion verb. Further, we demonstrate that marker choice is correlated to text genre and register, as well as the writing style of the author.

## introduction in many languages, adverbs can be derived from words of other parts-of-speech and are morphologically marked in the derivation process. in english, the '-ly' suffix is used to derive the adverb 'happily', for example, from the adjective 'happy'. analogously, in chinese, the '-de' suffix foot_0 can form adverbials from many adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. for example, the adverbial phrase gaoxing-de 'happily' is derived from the adjective gaoxing 'happy'. this paper analyzes the use of this adverbial marker, which has a standard written form (地 de) and a non-standard written form (的 de), with no difference in pronunciation. we will henceforth refer to the standard form as di foot_1 , and the non-standard form as de. the de vs. di choice is a language phenomenon that remains poorly understood. unlike the case for germanic vs. latinate affixes in english text @xcite , the choice is not directly tied to vocabulary, since every suffixed adverbial in chinese can be rendered in one of the two competing forms, which we will refer to as the "de-adverbial" (e.g., gaoxing-de 高兴的 'happily') and the "diadverbial" (e.g., gaoxing-di 高兴地 'happily'). it is not related to phonological factors, which can explain suffix choice in nonce-word nominalization @xcite , such as the choice between the suffix '-ness' or '-ity' following an adjective. nor is there a clear semantic distinction, as is the case for prefix choice in negation @xcite , such as the choice between the prefix 'non-' or 'un-' for an adjective. it is also not a language change "from below" @xcite , since the standard form di was proposed by the elites, at the beginning of the 20th century. unlike language regularization phenomena, the non-standard form persisted and is frequently used even to this day. it has been suggested that the choice is motivated by stylistic and expressional effects @xcite . more often associated with actions, di emphasizes the manner of the action, whereas de emphasizes other elements of the situation, such as the agent, patient, instrument, time, and place, etc. for example, in the sentence ta manman-di zou 他慢慢 地走 'he slowly walked', the di-adverbial highlights the slowness. in contrast, in the sentence ta gaoxing-de paole 他高兴的跑了 'he happily ran away', the de-adverbial not only characterizes the action but also brings out the attitudinal status of the subject 'he'. previous studies have postulated that marker choice may be due at least in part to habit or social factors, or even some randomness @xcite . in contrast, we set out to focus on the de vs. di marker choice that is intentionally made. to do so, we examine adverbials in the writings of six prominent authors in chinese literature in the 20th century. unlike most previous research, which offered only anecdotal examples and limited quantitative analysis to small samples @xcite , we present statistics on 346 adverbial types from an 8-millioncharacter corpus of literary texts. specifically, we address the following research questions: semantic analysis : whether adverbial marker choice is influenced by the semantic category of the head word, i.e. the verb modified by the adverbial (section 5); diachronic analysis : whether adverbial marker choice can reflect the writing style of an author (section 6). ## metrics for adverbial marker choice similar to other languages, chinese adverbials can be non-derived, or derived from base words of various parts-of-speech, typically through reduplication and suffixation @xcite . during suffixation, the base word is morphologically marked with the di (地 de) suffix, analogous to the english '-ly' suffix. for example, the adjective gaoxing 高兴 'happy' serves as the base word of the adverbial gaoxing-di 高兴地 'happily'. as an alternative to the standard form di, the adverbial marker is also written as the non-standard de (的 de). following previous analyses on chinese adverbial markers, we adopt the de ratio as the quantitative metric. this ratio is the percentage of suffixed adverbials, in a text or a collection of texts, that use de rather than di. more precisely, the ratio is the number of de-adverbials in the text, divided by the total number of de-and di-adverbials. the de ratio can be computed for a specific base word, by restricting the counts to adverbials derived from that base word. a base word is called "de-leaning" if its de ratio exceeds 50%, and "dileaning" otherwise. the percentage of de-leaning base words, out of all base words in the text, can also characterize marker choice. this metric gives equal weight to each base word, in contrast to the de ratio which can be swayed by the more frequent base words. together, the two metrics provide a more comprehensive view of adverbial marker usage. ## data there is no publicly available, large-scale corpus of chinese text with annotations on adverbial markers. this section describes the automatic creation of such a corpus to support this study. after presenting the textual material of the corpus (section 4.1), we describe the adverbial identification algoritm (section 4.2) and its evaluation (section 4.3). ## semantic categories of head word the verb modified by the adverbial, which we refer to as the "head word", may influence the choice of adverbial marker. specifically, we examine if there is any correlation between the semantic category of the head word and marker choice. we adopted the frame categories in mandarin verbnet (mvn) foot_5 as the semantic taxonomy for testing this hypothesis. a widely used verbal semantic database, mvn uses a schema-based meaning representation and constructional patterns for its frames @xcite . mvn provides a list of verbs for each frame. our analysis centers on the five top-level frames ( as shown in ## analysis our analysis focuses on the four authors with the most text in our corpus ( we automatically annotated all adverbials in our corpus with the adverbial identification algorithm. the overall marker choice by the authors are shown in ## conclusion we have presented the first large-scale, quantitative study on adverbial markers in modern chinese literature. drawing on over 8 million characters of literary texts, we investigated the usage of standard and non-standard adverbial markers among six major authors in the 20th century. a semantic analysis reveals that the non-standard marker de is more frequent when when the adverbial modifies a head word that expresses emotion, compared to other semantic categories. further, a diachronic analysis shows that marker choice is correlated to text genre and register, for example mao dun's preference for the standard marker and shen congwen's preference for the non-standard. marker choice also reflects the evolution of writing style amidst historical linguistic developments, as shown in the case of lu xun and lao she. this research can be extended in several dimensions. the influence of the base word can be further examined. more fine-grained semantic taxonomies on head words can potentially yield new insights. finally, as language change continues to affect marker choice, it would be interesting to study whether and how contemporary writers differ from their counterparts in the 20th century. figure 5: de ratio of lu xun (translation)