For China Unicom

Author: Yu Dequan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: couplets, like other forms of art, have their own characteristics, mainly parallelism and tonal coordination. In the Wenxin Diaolong, the section on "Beautiful Phrases" mentions "each sentence connects with the next" and "each character complements the other." In the Shitong, the section on "Narrative" states "words are not simply compiled; sentences are always paired, lengths are balanced, and odd and even complement each other." Although these are all discussions about parallelism in poetry and prose, since couplets primarily evolved from the parallelism of poetic lines, they actually also describe the characteristics of couplets.