Gradability And Graduation

This dissertation is designed as a holistic and systematic study on gradability. It mainly focuses on the nature, definition, role, function, channel, origin and classification of gradability.Categorization defines the members in a certain category by itself. Some categories have inherent degree of membership, fuzzy boundaries and central membership or show differences in intensity. This leads to the gradability among category members. Gradability functions within categories and categorization differentiate its members with gradability. The basic level and prototype of categories can be the basis to form gradability. Such gradable meaning coincides with the cognitive mechanism of human beings.Modality shows intermediacy between positive and negative poles. It has been recognized as a major tool to convey speaker's judgment, uncertainty, probability, usuality, obligation and inclination in a scale. When gradable interpersonal meanings are conveyed, modality comes into its use and defines the different degrees of meaning.Evidentiality, the source of information or knowledge, is classified into the visual, hearsay and the inferential. Evidentials, the expressions of evidentiality, can form a scale defined by the reliability of the relevant informational sources. The choice of evidentiality produces the hierarchy of factuality of proposition and gradability of meaning.Appraisal system, a theoretical framework to analyze the interpersonal meanings of a text, is classified into attitude, engagement and graduation systems. Attitude system explains human beings'understanding of the world and their emotional reactions, which provides the materials and ideas for evaluation. Engagement system explains the sources of ideas and emotions. With graduation, the affect, judgment and appreciation can be evaluated into different degrees of intensity. Graduation is mainly realized by the different shades of words in certain evaluative categories. It can also be performed with intensifiers, softening focus words, amplifiers, evaluative structures and contextual evaluation.Human communication involves a degree of manipulation or concealment. A scalar implicature, a quantity implicature, is inferred from the computation of elements on scales. Scalar implicature is assumed to arise when a speaker is taken to communicate the negation of a more informative proposition by expressing a less informative proposition. When one value in a scale is chosen and meant, the other values are negated. Gradability is the subdividability of a scale and it denotes a multi-valued scale.Metaphors map across conceptual domains. As there must be some difference between the metaphorical meaning and the surface meaning in language, the meaning degree occurs and gradability in meaning intensity can also be made. With the involvement of human imagination, the metaphorical meaning is colored, richly defined, vivid, profound and enlightening. The rhetorical color of metaphor is focused and the exact meaning is blurred. In this sense, metaphorical expressions shed different degrees of accuracy in meaning from the literal expressions. The vagueness of metaphorical language and the accuracy of literal language constitute the meaning scale, showing the gradability in exactness or imaginative power in human communication.With gradability, human beings can describe the world with explicit naming terms and a scale of proximity. Everything expressed from human cognition and thought can be subjective. The subjectivity distances the proposition from reality which produces the gradual scale between objectivity and subjectivity. Language economy is manifested by the huge amount of information conveyed by the relatively few language forms. Gradability acts as one functional tool to save the space with degrees. Different degrees of meaning are expressed to meet the appropriate contextual demands at various levels. In the actual communicative contexts, meaning and language can be tuned higher or lower, resulting in the sense of gradability. Certain degree modifiers or structural patterns are embodied with the sense of gradability through the process of grammaticalization.Gradability is defined as the universal feature of human cognition to show the different grades of meaning and language. Gradability can be divided into explicit and implicit types. The explicit gradability is performed by appraisal language, modality, and evidentiality while the implicit gradability functions with implicature and metaphor. Gradability can be attributed to subjectivity, naming necessity, language economy, grammaticalization and communicative context.