Written by Xinyu Zhu (Newcastle University), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society.
On March 6th and 7th, 2025, I attended the Mind Your Manner Adverbials! (MiMA!) workshop held at Utrecht University. This workshop marked the culmination of the Mind Your Manner Adverbials! project, providing a platform to share its findings and bringing together both junior and senior researchers to discuss the grammar of manner adverbials. With the generous support of PhilSoc’s Travel and Fieldwork Bursary, I had the opportunity to give an oral presentation on my ongoing PhD research, which is closely related to the topic of manner adverbials. The topic of my presentation is the syntax of reduplicated AABB pattern manner adverbials in Mandarin.
Adverbial phrases (i.e., zhuàngyǔ) in Mandarin, especially adverbs and some adjectives being used as adverbials, are commonly introduced by an adverbial particle de1 and occur at the pre-verbal position between the subject and the predicate, as shown in (1).
(1) a. Zhāngsān jímáng-de pǎo-huí-le jiā
Zhangsan hurriedly-DE1 run-back-ASP home
‘Zhangsan ran back home in a hurry.’
b. Lǐsì kāixīn-de chàng-zhe gē
Lisi happy-DE1 sing-PROG song
‘Lisi is singing happily.’
The adverb jímáng ‘hurriedly’ in (1a) and the adjective kāixīn ‘happy’ in (1b) are followed by the adverbial particle de1(i.e., jímáng–de1 ‘hurriedly’ and kāixīn-de1 ‘happily’). Not only that, but certain adverbials in Mandarin can undergo reduplication. These typically include adverbs, adjectives, and some onomatopoeic expressions. For example, reduplicable adverbials (i.e., the simple form) such as jímáng-de1 ‘hurriedly’, kāixīn-de1 ‘happily’, and huālā-de1‘crashing sound’ can be reduplicated to forms like jíjímángmáng-de1 ‘hurriedly’ kāikāixīnxīn-de1 ‘happily’, and huālālā-de1 ‘crashing sound’ (i.e., the reduplicated form). Typologically, adverbial reduplication has been mainly classified into six patterns based on the reduplication of morphemes in a phrase, namely, AA (e.g., gāng ‘just now’ to gānggāng ‘just now’), ABB (e.g., jímáng ‘hurriedly’ to jímángmáng ‘hurriedly’), AAB (e.g., duànhū ‘definitely’ to duànduànhū‘definitely’), ABA (e.g., yuè ‘more’ to yuèláiyuè ‘more and more’), AABB (e.g., yǒngyuǎn ‘forever’ to yǒngyǒngyuǎnyuǎn ‘forever’), and ABAB (e.g., xiāngdāng ‘quite’ to xiāngdāngxiāngdāng ‘quite’. The reasons and effects of adverbial reduplication have long been a hot topic, with most attributing reduplication to the strengthening of tone and changing of semantics, such as adding and subtracting meanings (Zhang, 2014). Nevertheless, my research mainly focuses on the syntactic implications of reduplication, which have not yet been systematically investigated. That is, reduplicated forms exhibit greater distributional flexibility. More specifically, reduplicated forms can be fronted, postposed, or even used as freestanding phrases, whereas their simple counterparts are typically restricted to an in-situposition, maintaining adjacency to the predicate (Zhou, 2009; Pan, 2014; Zhang, 2014). Consider reduplicated adverbial fronting as an example:
(2) {Cōngcōngmángmáng-de/*Cōngmáng-de}adv Zhāngsān tadv líkāi-le
Hurriedly-DE1 Zhangsan leave-PST
‘In such a hurry, Zhangsan left.’
Both the simple form (i.e., cōngmáng–de) and reduplicated form (i.e., cōngcōngmángmáng-de) can occur in-situ (i.e., right before the VP líkāi-le). However, the reduplicated form can also be fronted to the sentence-initial position whereas the simple form cannot. To address the research question of why reduplicable manner adverbials, which in their unreduplicated form can only occur near verbs, gain a more flexible distribution after reduplication, my presentation reported on the following aspects.
First, I select the AABB pattern reduplicated manner adverbials as the primary subject of my research, as their simple forms (i.e., the AB pattern) are mostly standalone adverbials. Moreover, not like functional adverbials, such as temporal adverbs that already have a freer distribution (Cinque, 1999; Ernst, 2020), manner adverbials in Mandarin generally occur between the subject and predicate, making them more suitable for examining the syntactic differences between simple and reduplicated forms. Other patterns of reduplication, such as AA, ABB, or ABA, are set aside because certain parts of their simple forms cannot be used independently, often requiring a verb as a root morpheme or not existing as standalone words. Then, a total of 33 reduplicated AABB manner adverbials were collected from the reduplicated adverbials corpus that I designed with my co-supervisor (Zhu and Zhang, under review). Using this dataset, I conducted further searches for sentences containing these manner adverbials in the CCL (Zhan et al., 2019) corpus. The findings indicate that, compared to their simple counterparts, reduplicated forms often exhibit six variable syntactic distributions. A summary table is provided below.
| Sentence-medial | Adjacent pre-verbal | [subject] > [AABB] > [predicate] |
| Pre-adverbial | [subject] > [AABB] > [other adverbials] > [predicate] | |
| Sentence-initial | [AABB] > [subject] > [predicate] | |
| Sentence-final | [subject] > [predicate] > [AABB] | |
| Post-dé | [subject] > [predicate-dé] > [AABB] | |
| Freestanding | [AABB]. [subject] > [predicate] | |
| [subject] > [predicate]. [AABB] | ||
Generally, I categorise the syntactic distribution of AABB manner adverbials into five main types. The first type is sentence-medial, which refers to the default position, typically adjacent to the verb (pre-verbal), as well as the pre-adverbial position when multiple adverbials appear in a sentence. The second type is sentence-initial, where the adverbials are fronted. The third type is sentence-final, where the adverbials are postposed. The fourth type involves the post-déposition, in which reduplicated adverbials can directly follow the post-verbal particle dé (i.e., 得), whereas their simple forms must co-occur with degree modifiers and are prohibited from appearing with de1 alone. The fifth type is freestanding, where the adverbials can function as standalone adverbial phrases.
Second, since the adverbial particle de1 in Mandarin has been proposed to inflect the distribution of adverbs (Larson, 2018), I descriptively investigated the co-occurrence of de1 and reduplicated manner adverbials at their various positions based on the corpus data and drew the following findings.
| Co-occurrence | AABB + de1 | AB + de1 |
| Adjacent pre-verbal | OPTIONAL | OBLIGATORY |
| Sentence-initial | OBLIGATORY | N/A |
| Sentence-final | OBLIGATORY | N/A |
| Post-dé | OPTIONAL | PROHIBITED |
| Freestanding | OPTIONAL | N/A |
| Pre-adverbial | OPTIONAL | N/A |
The co-occurrence of de1 with reduplicated AABB manner adverbials is generally optional, except in two cases, when these adverbials appear in sentence-initial or sentence-final positions, where de1 is typically required. In contrast, for simple forms, the attachment of de1 is generally obligatory in the default adjacent pre-verbal position. It is worth noting that a certain number of simple-form manner adverbials can also occur directly in the post-dé position based on the findings from the CCL corpus, but in such cases, the presence of de1 is strictly prohibited.
Third, degree adverbs in Mandarin (e.g., hěn ‘very’ and fēicháng ‘extremely’) also reflect an interesting phenomenon with reduplication. The simple forms of reduplicated manner adverbials are normally able to co-occur with those degree adverbs while the reduplicated forms cannot, wherever they occur. A similar pattern can also be observed with AABB reduplicated adjectives in relation to degree adverbs.
Given the descriptive overview above, I preliminarily proposed a syntax-phonology-semantics interfaces account to explain the variable positioning of AABB reduplicated manner adverbials. Two hypotheses were put forward: 1) the AB pattern reduplicable manner adverbials get subjective/evaluative semantic features when reduplicated into the AABB pattern, which is henceforth licensed at the periphery (e.g., CP) /functional (e.g., vP) level of Mandarin; 2) variable positioning also demands certain phonological patterns in the occupied elements, which reduplicated forms can fulfil, but not their simple counterparts. More research will be continuously carried out.
Overall, I was delighted to participate in this workshop and received a great deal of valuable feedback from many attendees. As a second-year PhD student, it was incredibly helpful to have the opportunity to present my current research to fellow scholars with shared research interests. I am sincerely grateful to PhilSoc for awarding me the travel and fieldwork bursary, and I would like to thank the audience at the MiMA workshop for their insightful suggestions and ideas regarding my research.
References
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford University Press.
Ernst, Thomas. 2020. The syntax of adverbials. Annual Review of Linguistics 6(1).89-109.
Larson, Richard. 2018. AP-de Adverbs in Mandarin. Studies in Chinese Linguistics 39(1).1-28.
Pan, Victor Junnan. 2014. Deriving special questions in Mandarin Chinese: a comparative study. In Jong-Un Park & Il-Jae Lee (eds.), Comparative syntax: proceedings of the 16th Seoul international conference on Generative Grammar, 349-368. The Korean Generative Grammar Circle.
Zhan, Weidong, Rui Guo, Baobao Chang, Yirong Chen & Long Chen. 2019. The building of the CCL corpus: its design and implementation. Corpus Linguistics 6(1). 71-86.
Zhang, Yisheng. 2014. Xiandai Hanyu fuci yanjiu [A study on modern Chinese adverbs]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.
Zhou, Jun. 2009. Fuci chongdieshi de leixingxue yanjiu [A typological study on the reduplication of adverbs]. Hunan Normal University MPhil thesis.
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