A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Modern Chinese Adverbs “Zhen”, “Zhenshi” And “Zhende”

Authors

Luu Hon Vu
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ho Chi Minh City Banking University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Abstract

This research used the Modern Chinese Research Corpus System constructed by Beijing Language and Culture University as the corpus source, and analyzed the pragmatic functions of Modern Chinese adverbs “zhen”, “zhenshi” and “zhende” which are located before the predicate and are used as sentence adverbial. The results show that these adverbs have similarities and differences in pragmatic functions. The adverb “zhen” has four pragmatic functions: one is to confirm authenticity, the other is to express subjective evaluation, the third is to express a high degree of authenticity, and the fourth is to make hypotheses. The adverb “zhenshi” has only one pragmatic function, that is, the subjective evaluation function. The adverb “zhende” has two pragmatic functions: one is to confirm authenticity, and the other is to express subjective evaluation. The adverb “zhenshi” and “zhende” can appear together with the degree adverbs “tai” and “hen”, but the adverb “zhen” cannot appear with the degree adverbs. The adverb “zhen” and the adverb “zhende” can be replaced with each other, and the meaning of the sentence remains unchanged after the replacement.