On The Expression Of Subjective Quantity In Chinese

Strictly speaking, all utterances have subjectivity and those without speaker's attitude, emotion and viewpoint don't exist. When subjectivity is expressed in the category of quantity, it becomes the concept of subjective quantity". Every language has its ways to express subjective quantity and Chinese is no exception. This dissertation aims to study the various ways to express subjective quantity and their regulations in Chinese in a systematic way. While focusing on Chinese, it also takes some of the examples from English, Korean and Japanese into consideration.The whole dissertation consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 demonstrates the relationship between subjective quantity and subjectivity in general. It also analyzes the differences and connections between subjective quantity and objective quantity. What's more, such concepts as "referential quantity","expected quantity", and"view point"which are closely related to the definition of subjective quantity are explained in this chapter. At the same time, it emphasizes that subjective quantity is a matter of degree.Chapters 2 to 5 discuss the various ways to express subjective quantity in Chinese. Chapter 2 studies the phonetic means of expressing subjective quantity, focusing on the description and explanation of such means as stress, rime variation, tone variation, vowel aperture, vowel duration and diminutive suffixes. The chapter also explores"sound symbolism"and the relationship between subjective quantity and emotion. Chapter 3 examines the lexical means of expressing subjective quantity. It offers a rather systematic summary and explanation of the various lexical items of expressing subjective quantity through several basic pairs of spatial concepts like"reach","not pass","pass","not reach"and"continuity". The cognitive and pragmatic motivations that govern these lexical means are examined in the chapter, too. Chapter 4 is about the means of using word order to express subjective quantity. Since the past research in this respect is fragmentary and unsystematic, this chapter makes an attempt to remedy the situation.Chapters 2, 3 and 4 also examines the phenomena of asymmetry in subjective quantity and summarize them by means of a unified"markedness theory". Chapter 5 presents a discussion of the various kinds of reduplication as a means of expressing subjective quantity. Based on the previous studies, it provides a more comprehensive description and places particular emphasis on some disputable problems like whether the reduplicating forms show the upper degree or the lower degree as well as issues regarding linguistic iconicity. Chapter 6 is about mood particles including those positioned at the end of sentences and modal adverbs. In particular, it examines and explains the differences and similarities of some modal adverbs from the perspective of grammaticalization. Sentence patterns are also an important means of expressing subjective quantity. Though they aren't dealt with in a separate chapter, the discussion of relevant sentence or phrase patterns can be found throughout the whole dissertation, because this kind of discussion can not be separated from the discussion of other means.The last chapter (chapter 7 ) is the conclusion, making some suggestions for future research on the topic under investigation.