In this paper, all the diphthong adverbs that appear in TaiPingGuangJi are studied. TaiPingGuangJi is a large class book compiled by Li Fang and other novelists during the TaiPing period in the early Song Dynasty. The book contains historical information, biographies of people, museums, geography, national systems, myths and legends from more than four hundred canonical texts from the pre-Qin dynasty to the early Song dynasty, and is acollection and compilation of the linguistic vocabulary of the Chinese dynasties. At the same time, the language vocabulary of the early Song period is also used as the medium of expression in the compilation of the class books. Therefore, it can be said that TaiPingGuangJi inherited and developed the Chinese vocabulary from the ancient to the medieval period, and absorbed the linguistic elements of the current dynasty. The study of the development and evolution of the diphthong adverbs in the early Song period, using TaiPingGuangJi as linguistic material, is crucial to grasp the overall situation of the ancient Chinese adverbial system.
This paper presents an exhaustive survey of diphthong adverbs in TaiPingGuangJi, paying attention to the differences between diphthong adverbs and diphthong adjectives, diphthong nouns indicating time, diphthong conjunctions, and two monosyllabic adverbial conjugated forms. On this basis, this paper classifies the diphthong adverbs in TaiPingGuangJi into seven types, namely, alliterative, overlapping, additional, juxtaposition, dominant, partial, and interlayer, from the perspective of the relationship between the two lexical elements of diphthong adverbs. Among them, diphthong adverbs are composed of two syllables concatenated, and can be divided into two sub-categories: diphthong adverbs and overlapping adverbs. Overlapping diphthong adverbs, in which the phonology and meaning of the two constituent elements are identical, can be divided into three subcategories according to the lexical nature of the monosyllabic verb overlapping, monosyllabic noun and adjective overlapping, and monosyllabic pronoun, number, and measure overlapping. Additional diphthong adverbs are composed of "root + ending" and can be divided into seven subcategories according to the endings of the adverbs. Parallel diphthong adverbs are formed by concatenating two lexemes in parallel, and can be divided into three subcategories: proximal parallelism, antonymic parallelism, andnegative parallelism, depending on the connection between the lexemes. Among them, diphthong adverbs can be divided into five subcategories: scope, time, mood, tone, and degree, depending on their grammatical meanings. The relationship between the dominant diphthong adverbs is one of domination anddominated. The two constituent morphemes of the partial formal diphthong adverbs are related to each other as modifier and modified. Depending on the syntactic components of the modifier and the modified, they can also be divided into two subcategories: definite middle and dative middle. Cross-layer diphthong adverbs originally do not have a direct grammatical structural relationship, but because they often appear together, the phenomenon of cross-structural condensation occurs.
From the perspective of the grammatical function of diphthong adverbs in TaiPingGuangJi, they are mainly used for modification, description and limitation, etc. They are generally used as adverbial componentsin sentences. At some times, they can also be used as a complement alone, and can be used to modify the predicative component of a sentence or the whole sentence, including verbal predicates, adjective predicates, and some adverbs with specific meanings can sometimes be used to modify noun predicates. In addition, the paper elaborates on the function of TaiPingGuangJi diphthong adverbs as complementary and sentence-initial modifiers from the perspective of their special syntactic function.
From the statistics of the number of adverbs in this paper, there are 257 diphthong adverbs and 222 monosyllabic adverbs in TaiPingGuangJi. To a certain extent, it shows that the number of diphthong adverbs in Chinese already exceeded that of monosyllabic adverbs in the early Song Dynasty. Therefore, it can be said that the diphthong adverbs system of TaiPingGuangJi is not only a summary and accumulation of diphthong adverbs of previous generations, but also the starting point for the development of diphthong adverbs in modern Chinese.
Some of the diphthong adverbs in TaiPingGuangJi are inherited from the Upper Classical Chinese, but most of them were produced in the Middle Classical Chinese. Although a considerable number of diphthong adverbs arose and were only active in the Middle Chinese period, they were a necessary stage in the process of disyllabicization of ancient Chinese words and the evolution of the adverb system. TaiPingGuangJi played a role in the history of the development of ancient Chinese adverbs.