An Analysis Of Extreme Complement Of Degree In Contemporary Chinese

In recent years, the author found that there is an extreme complement of degree after qualitative adjective and some verbs in contemporary Chinese. They are not only popular in all kinds of magazine and newspapers but also in oral Chinese. Firstly the paper defined the up-concept and down-concept of extreme complement of degree; Though many people have discussed it, but they had different ideas. The paper believes that the so-called extreme complements of degree are used after some qualitative adjectives and verbs and express a extreme extent. To decide whether a word is an extreme complement of degree, we can depend on the two points: it must be after the predicate and at the same time, it should express a extreme state. And then the paper discussed the characteristics of the extreme complements of degree in grammar, semantics and pragmatics. The extreme complement of degree is a special complement of degree, it is subjective to the complement of degree and has many features that is the same to the complement of degree, but it is different with an ordinary complement of degree. It can be divided into "Verb-complement" phrase and the "verb+de(å¾—)+complement". It is because of the difference in structure that leads to so many differences in grammar, semantic and pragmatics.