Research On Negative Polar Adverbs In Modern Chinese

This dissertation studies the related problems of the negative polarity adverbs in modern Chinese with the theories and methods of structural linguistics,pragmatics,cognitive linguistics and contrastive linguistics from the perspective of positive and negative polarity in the combination of macro and micro ways.This dissertation is divided into thirteen chapters.Chapter One is the introduction.This chapter introduces the research object,significance of the research,the theoretical background and research methods.In addition,it reviews previous domestic and oversea research and presents a brief description of source corpus.From Chapter Two to Chapter Six study the negative polarity adverbs in modern Chinese at the macro level.Chapter Two focuses on the concept and category of the negative polarity adverbs.Firstly,this chapter discusses the concept of polarity items and negative polarity items,and then puts forward the research object of this thesis “Negative polarity adverb”.It also discusses and defines the concept of the negative polarity adverbs,and lists three important criteria for defining these adverbs and locates the scope and specific the members.Finally,according to the different characteristics of the adverbs in the grammatical meaning and the degree of dependence on the negative context,such adverbs are classified in order to set the foundation for further investigation.Chapter Three summarizes and analyzes the similarities and differences of the negative polarity adverbs in modern Chinese in the syntactic and semantic features.In syntactic feature aspect,it mainly describes and explains the adverbs from the syntactic function,the modifier,the syntactic distribution and scope,the selectional-restriction relations to negatives,the word order while the negatives co-occur with them,etc.In semantic feature aspect,it mainly describes and analyzes the maximal or minimal quantity that the negative polarity adverbs have,and also tries to explore immanent mechanism that these adverbs tend to combine with negative structures from the perspective of the maximal or minimal quantity.Chapter Four investigates the syntagmatic relation of negative structures containing the negatives “?”,“?(?)” and “?” on the basis of the classification of these adverbs? grammatical meaning.Although they are the same negative polarity adverbs or even belong to the same subcategory,the syntagmatic relation is not the same.There are both similarities and differences.Chapter Five firstly introduces the definition and general classification of modality.Then based on the results of modality,an analysis and discussion of negative structures containing semantic types of modality are carried out.In addition,it emphasis on the selectional-restriction relations between the negative polarity adverbs and semantic types of modality of negative structures.Chapter Six describes the syntagmatic relation of positive structures,then sums up the characteristics and try to explain why they can be combined with positive structures.Finally,it analyzes and summarizes the pragmatic function of the negative polarity adverbs.Chapter Seven to Chapter Ten study the negative polarity adverbs in modern Chinese at the micro level.Four Negative polarity adverbs are chosen for case study of the degree adverbs,the temporal adverbs,the range adverbs and the modal adverbs.They are“??”,“??”,“??”and“??”.Every chapter makes quantitative analysis of the sentences containing the four adverbs by employing the corpus of CCL.Then according to the data,qualitative analysis is used to prove whether they can be considered as members of the negative polarity adverbs.In addition,according to the data collected,the dependence on the dominant negative structures with the negatives,the word order of co-occurring and the freedom degree of the negatives with the four adverbs,the distance interval,etc.are deeply studied.The polarity sensitivity is summarized as the negative polarity adverbs.The distribution of context,especially various syntactic features and grammatical meaning,the negative polarity when adverbs co-occur with negative structures,the selectional-restriction relations to nouns,verbs,adjectives,etc.are investigated and summarized.Finally the idea is presented that the negative polarity adverbs prefer the negative context because it is a coordinated result of the word?s meaning,the semantic features of maximal or minimal quantity,emphatic function and cascading logic.Chapter Eleven and Chapter Twelve contrastively study negative polarity adverbs in Chinese and Japanese.Chapter Eleven compares syntactic distribution,semantic characters of the negative polarity adverbs in Chinese and Japanese at the macro-level.Firstly,defining standards are introduced and the negative polarity adverbs in Chinese and Japanese are located.Then,the composing mode,different types of co-occurrence components,the word order and scope when the negative polarity adverbs co-occur with the negatives,the semantic features of maximal or minimal quantity,the formation mechanism of the negative polarity adverbs are deeply studied.Universals and variations are summarized.Chapter Twelve compares the similarities and differences of “???” and “?” “?/?” at the micro level.They are typical negative polarity adverbs in their own language,and have common semantic characteristics.The similarities and differences are analyzed from different angles such as the negative patterns,their own semantic background,grammatical meanings used in negative sentences,part negation or full negation,the selection and limitation of co-occurrence component,etc.The situations of correspondence and non-correspondence are summed up and deeply studied,and reasons are also provided.Chapter Thirteen is the conclusion.