Colorful Words with a Clanging Sound: Descriptive Adjectives in Zhang Ailing’s Short Stories

In the vast and rich vocabulary of the short stories collected in Chuanqi (Romances), the class of状态形容词zhuàngtài xíngróngcí (descriptive or stative adjectives) has been identified as one of the main lexical devices that concur in creating the unique pictorial and sensuous quality of Zhang Ailing's writing. Focusing mainly on the ABB adjectives subclass, this essay individuates some of the expressive potentialities of these words and demonstrates, through examples taken from the minutely detailed descriptions where they occur at a quite high frequency, how Zhang Ailing makes full use of their semantic and sensorial richness, as well as of their syllabic structure, to create atmospheres, externalize the characters' states of mind and intensify the narrative tension. Other two subclasses of descriptive adjectives, BA compounds (mainly color adjectives) and reduplicated forms, are also briefly introduced, since the effect Zhang Ailing achieves in her descriptions is often the result of the converging of items from all the three different subclasses in a single passage.