The six characteristics of couplets are: nationality, folk, practicality, enlightenment, rigor and exquisiteness. From a cultural point of view, couplet art has cultural characteristics and functions such as nationality, folklore (that is, mass and tradition), practicality and enlightenment.
On the other hand, from the literary point of view, couplet art has obvious literary and artistic creation characteristics and requirements such as rigor (concentrated in symmetry) and exquisiteness.
Requirements for couplets:
1, words are equal and sentences are consistent. In addition to deliberately leaving a place for a word to achieve a certain effect, the number of words in the upper and lower couplets must be the same, neither more nor less.
2. Be straightforward and have a harmonious tone. The traditional habit is to "pucker up and fall flat", that is, the end of the last sentence of the first couplet is puckered up and the end of the last sentence of the second couplet is flat.
3. Parts of speech should be relative and in the same position. It is generally called "virtual to virtual, real to real", which means that nouns to nouns, verbs to verbs, adjectives to adjectives, quantifiers to quantifiers, adverbs to adverbs and related words must be in the same position.
4. Be content-related, from top to bottom. The meaning of up and down links must be interrelated, but they cannot be repeated.
Couplets should be "paired", that is, they are composed of upper couplet and lower couplet. The number of words in the upper and lower couplets must be equal and the content should be consistent, that is, the upper and lower couplets can be "linked" (parallel), and two unrelated sentences can not be combined together to form a couplet. Generally, couplets are written vertically, with the last word (tone) of the first couplet posted on the right (hand) and the last word (tone) of the second couplet posted on the left (hand).