An undocumented adverbial use of <i>zaìshì</i> 在勢 in Late Qing and Early Republican literature

Abstract This article provides a detailed description of an undocumented use of zaìshì 在勢 as a deontic adverb in Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese literature. This word commonly functions as a verb (“to hold power”) or a nominalized verb (“one who holds power”), but its use as a preposed deontic adverb, meaning “under these circumstances”, is not attested in earlier Chinese texts and has no cognates in other Sinitic languages. The author analyses the syntax and semantics of zaìshì in a large corpus of medieval Chinese texts and early Chinese translations of foreign literature. The article then suggests that the preposed deontic adverb zaìshì emerged as the result of the appropriation of linguistic elements present in classical literature but whose use had been restricted to classical forms of literary composition.