The Inspections Of Circumstances Of The Adjective Envelopes To The Degree Adverb

The objects of the paper are words changing from adjective to degreeadverb. After investigation, we found the following14words the most typical,namely:“Hen”，“Ting”，“Guai”，“You”，“Shen”，“Da”，“Hao”，“Po”，“Shu”，“Ju”，“Yi Chang”，“Shao”，“Wei” and “Tai”. We will explore the evolution of thesedegree adverbs based on the theories of the three levels and the grammaticalization.Accordingly, we can acquire the evolution rule of the degree adverb：Adjective is themain source of adverbs of degree, both in semantic correlation, as the adverbialposition fixed, eventually the adjectives evolved into the degree adverbs. The paperincludes three chapters.The first part is an introduction, and it mainly introduces the research content, theresearch present situation, the research significance and the research methods. Atpresent, most researches in this field are case study. Few are systematic research, andthis study aims to fill this deficiency.The second part is the main part of the paper. We will divide the degree adverbsinto three categories--excessive quantity, high quantity and low quantity. From thefirst chapter to the third chapter, the author separately introduces the evolution periodand the evolution process. Moreover, the author elaborates the evolution of thesewords from the perspective of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic.The third part contains the final two chapters; the fourth chapter is the summary ofthe first three chapters, which states the evolution motivation and the mechanismfrom the adjective to the adverb of degree. The author holds that the motivation canbe divided into three aspects: the suitability of semantic, the fixed function ofpragmatic and syntactic position. Furthermore, the evolving mechanism includes thesemantic generalization, reanalysis and psychological cognitive mechanism. The fifthchapter is mainly summarizing the evolution rule of this kind of word, which are theconclusion part of this paper and the deficiency of the paper.