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How can Chinese adjectives also function as adverbs?
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Chinese languages
Oracle bone inscriptions from the village of Xiaotun, Henan province, China; Shang dynasty, 14th or 12th century bce.
In Modern Standard Chinese, adjectives are often classified as qualitative or stative verbs. Because they function as verbs, they do not require the same morphological changes (such as the addition of "-ly" in English) to modify other actions.
Instead, these words can function adverbially by appearing before a verb to describe how an action is performed. When an adjective is used to modify a verb in this way, it is often linked to the verb using the particle de (ε°), which marks the preceding word as an adverbial modifier. This structure allows the stative quality of the word to describe the manner of the action, effectively serving the role of an adverb within the sentence's syntax.1