漢語副詞的前人文獻相當貧乏，有關情態副詞的研究尤其缺乏。本文有鑑於此，擬就漢語情態副詞的語意內涵與句法功能做一番較為深入的分析與討論。本文共分五節。第一節「前言」探討「情態」的含義與情態副詞在漢語情態詞中的地位；第二節「漢語的情狀副詞與情態副詞」比較情狀副詞與情態副詞，就語意、形態、詞類、詞序等各方面比較其異同；第三節「漢語的情態動詞╱形容詞與情態副詞」，詳細比較情態動詞╱形容詞與情態副詞在語法功能上的差異；第四節「漢語的副詞與情態副詞」在評介 Travis (1988) 的分析與理論之後，把此一理論應用到漢語副詞的分類與分析上面來；第五節「結論」總結本文的內容與結論。漢語的副詞可以大別為說話者導向副詞、認知副詞與情狀副詞三類，分別由大句子、小句子、主語呼應詞組或動詞組的主要語屬性來認可。這樣的分析，再加上副詞的修飾範域由屬性滲透來指派以及屬性滲透不能交叉途徑而同一個屬性可以包含一個以上的指標的主張，可以說明為什麼漢語副詞的出現次序是：說話者導向副詞<認知副詞<情態副詞<情狀副詞。

　　　　　There is not much previous literature concerning Chinese adverbs and adverbials in general, and even less have been written about Chinese modal adverbs in particular. The present paper thus aims to thoroughly investigate the semantic content as well as the syntactic function in Mandarin Chinese. The paper consists of five sections. Section 1 introduces the definition of modality and discusses the status of modal adverbs among Chinese modal expressions while Section 2 compares manner adverbs and modal adverbs with regard to their semantic content, morphological shape, syntactic category and grammatical distribution. Then Section 3 conducts a detailed comparison between modal verbs, adjectives and adverbs in terms of their syntactic function while Section 4 applies Travis’ (1988) theory of adverbs to the analysis and subclassification of Chinese adverbs. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the content and conclusion of the paper. In our analysis, Chinese adverbs are mainly subclassified into speaker-oriented adverbs, epistemic adverbs, modal adverbs and manner adverbs, licensed by the head features of CP, IP, AGRsP and VP, respectively. This analysis, coupled both with the proposal that the scope of modification by adverbs be assigned through feature percolation and with the convention that while a given head feature may be contained in more than one head, the percolation of features cannot cross their paths, will naturally account for the linear order of Chinese adverbs; namely, speaker-oriented adverbs<(=precede) epistemic adverbs<modal adverbs<manner adverbs.