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.

In many languages, adverbials can be derived from words of various parts-of-speech. In Chinese, the derivation may be marked either with the standard adverbial marker DI, or the non-standard marker DE. Since DE also serves double duty as the attributive marker, accurate identification of adverbials requires disambiguation of its syntactic role. As parsers are trained predominantly on texts using the standard adverbial marker DI, they often fail to recognize adverbials suffixed with the non-standard DE. This paper addresses this problem with an unsupervised, rule-based approach for adverbial identification that utilizes dependency tree patterns. Experiment results show that this approach outperforms a masked language model baseline. We apply this approach to analyze standard and non-standard adverbial marker usage in modern Chinese literature.