The Study Of Focus-Sensitive Features And The Mode Of Sentence On The Adverb ’Dao’ In Modern Chinese

The adverb ‘Dao’（å€'）is a very special word in Modern Chinese. It is one of the mostimportant ways that help people to express themselves efficiently in communication. Thestudies of this adverb have had very large scope, including semantic functions, syntax,grammatical meanings, diachronic development, etc. These studies have got manyconstructive opinions, but there are some spaces for us to discover. This thesis studies theadverb ‘Dao’ from three aspects: the basic grammatical meanings of ‘Dao’, thefocus-sensitive features and the structure mode of those sentences with the word ‘Dao’.In this thesis we defined the basic grammatical meaning of the adverb ‘Dao’ asnegation and comparison in a latent manner. The specialty of this word is conveying inthis way. We got two rules of using this word when analyzing the irregular sentences,which will help us use the word more efficiently and correctly.The adverb ‘Dao’ is a focus-sensitive operator. We classified the word into two typesaccording to the different kind of focuses that associate with ‘Dao’, one is comparisonfocus-sensitive operator ‘Dao1’ and another one is subject focus-sensitive operator ‘Dao2’.We added R3as the supplementary rule of R₁and R₂when we realized that R₁and R₂arenot complete.There are three structure modes of those sentences that with the word ‘Dao’:â‘ B DaoC;â‘¡B₁C₁, B₂Dao C2;â‘¢B₁Dao C₁, D. The first mode ‘B Dao C’ has a quite largeproportion in the corpus. The mode of the sentences also has dependencies on subjectivity.The last part of this thesis is concluding remarks. In this part, we summed up theconclusions of this study and introduced some extending studies based on the thesis.