| Abstract |
In Chinese there are many modal adverbs composed of antonyms, such as Hengshu ‘horizontal and vertical’, Fanzheng ‘upside and downside’, Sihuo ‘dead and alive’, Haodai ‘good and bad’, Zuoyou ‘left and right’, Gaodi ‘high and low’, Changduan ‘long and short’, Duoshao ‘more or less’, Zaowan ‘early or late’ etc. The characteristics of these adverbs, such as the expressing of two different moods, being distributed mainly in epistemic and speech act domains, co-occurring frequently with complex sentences, etc, will be discussed first and the causes of their usages will then be explored in the paper. The paper argues that the semantic interspace of the two components of these compound adverbs is large enough to include complex sentence relations, and thus leads to different moods and the corresponding usages. In addition, the moods these adverbs can express are decided by the semantic relations of the antonyms inside the adverbs, hence their histories reflect clear consecutive influences of compound structures on word meanings and of word meanings on syntactic usages.
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