On the Chinese clitic 的 "de"

Abstract

Clitics play an essential role in the syntactic structure of the Chinese language, owing to the language’s intrinsic characteristics. Without clitics, sentences cannot be built, because they – among other things – carry important grammatical content. Indeed, each Chinese clitic has a special grammatical function, and are difficult to replace without changing the original meaning of the sentences. The word “的” occurs with highest frequency among all Chinese clitics. This, like many other so-called “empty words”, serves various Chinese grammatical functions, and thus constitutes a very interesting topic of Chinese grammatical research. Since the 1920s, generations of scholars have devoted themselves to this study, including among others Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), Gao Mingkai (高名凯), Chen Qiongzan (陈琼瓒), Fan Jiyan (范继淹) and Zhu Dexi (朱德熙). One of Zhu’s articles on “的 (de)” has provoked widespread scholarly discussion, and has had a profound influence. But even today, the word’s use remains a stumbling block for both teachers and students of Chinese. The ambiguities that can potentially occur, as well as the semantic and pragmatic differences of its use and disuse, have puzzled not only foreigners, but also many natives. In this paper, we will attempt to define the appropriate uses for the word, and analyze the word’s semantic and pragmatic values.