A Functional Analysis Of Syntactic Flexibility Of Mandarin Chinese Adverbs In Spoken Language

Mandarin Chinese adverbs are a rather special set of words, for which researches on them have always been paid enough attention by major Mandarin Chinese grammar scholars without interruption. During the past different periods of Mandarin Chinese adverbs researching, many researchers and experts have generally noticed an important grammatical phenomenon that adverbs have syntactic flexibility in spoken language. On the estimation and explanation of this phenomenon, different researchers have varied opinions, a prevalent one of which is to consider the flexibility as syntax-exchange or syntax-invert. However, according to our lingual experience, to simply classify adverbs'flexibility as syntax-exchange or syntax-invert is not accurate enough. Moreover, this phenomenon is quite natural and common in spontaneous speech, which has already been made good description in relevant researches we cite. Therefore, it is quite necessary to make a specialized examination and to give a systemic explanation on and to this phenomenon.According to research principle of functional grammar, we pay special attention to these spontaneous speech data, and try to reconstruct the scene of language communication in which we examine the adverbs flexibility phenomenon. To pay special attention to practical use of language consequently requires a careful consideration of frequency in language use. In this dissertation, language use frequency is the key for us to examine and explain the adverbs flexibility phenomenon, and specific explanations of grammaticalization from a historical view and discourse grammar from a pragmatics view are our two ways to do this research work. These two ways can be combined and unified under the root of frequency; moreover, explanation of discourse grammar from a pragmatics view can be seen as an extending of explanation of grammaticalization from a historical view.Grammaticalization of movable adverbs is one of their language use frequency effects, and the degree of grammaticalization is right relevant to language use frequency. We cite the result of relevant research that is made after searching in data over 20 million characters, consult a lexicon that is compiled according to Mandarin Chinese Frequency Dictionary, and after doing statistical work we find that the most flexible adverbs are those used most frequently, and, obviously, flexibility phenomenon can be considered as a syntactic trace of grammaticalization. Grammaticalization of movable adverbs has both syntactic and semantic evolvement mechanism. For aspect of syntax, movable adverbs show a tendency from inside of a sentence to outside of the sentence; for aspect of semantics, the evolvement of movable adverbs show as subjectivisation. Movable adverbs obtain discourse function because of subjectivisation in conversation or discourse, which, to be specific, is discourse connecting function of syntactic-front movable adverbs and discourse completing function of syntactic-back movable adverbs. In fact, the description of these two functions can be seen as an extending of explanation to the directional difference of syntactic evolvement of movable adverbs. Therefore, the explanations to syntactic flexibility of Mandarin Chinese adverbs in spoken language have been well unified.In this dissertation, we adopt research principle and method of functional grammar, originally and creatively make a specialized examination and give a systemic explanation from both historical and pragmatics angle on and to syntactic flexibility of Mandarin Chinese adverbs in spoken language. Also, we have made some contribution to the effectual-data-based theory deduction and construction.