A new categorization framework for Chinese adverbs

Abstract

Previous studies on the categorization of Chinese adverbs have not come to a conclusive end, in part due to their varying criteria. While many studies have focused on subcategories of adverbs, the boundaries of the subcategories themselves are not clear. As a result, there is still no clear picture where Chinese adverbs stand in the whole field of Chinese semantics. In addition, not enough features have been explored in order to derive highly cohesive categories. In this paper, we present a new categorization framework for Chinese adverbs. Firstly, four coarse-grained categories are proposed according to the semantic structures of sentences, including the proposition, modalities, aspect and other meaning components. Then, several semantic and syntactic features are used to further divide the four categories into more than ninety finer-grained subcategories. Based on the new framework, we find that adverbs in the same category function in similar ways, both semantically and syntactically.