Rhetorical Adverbs Study

Guided by the pragmatics and semantics of functionalism, this thesistries to make a preliminary and overall investigation on the function ofthe interrogative adverbs by means of the syntax, semantic and pragmaticdescription. This thesis is composed of three chapters except the prefaceand the summary.The preface of the thesis mainly summarizes the achievements made bythe former researchers and introduces the theories and methods, thesignificance of the research and the origin of the corpora used in thethesis.The first chapter describes the syntactic distribution of theinterrogative adverbs such as "难道","岂","何X"and so on, discussesthe characteristics and differences of their syntactic function andsemantic comprehension of the interrogative sentences which are composedby them. It involves the syntactic position, the habitual frame, theindependent usage, the differences of semantic expression and the usingstyle of the interrogative adverbs. We think: firstly, there are varietiesin syntactic function of the interrogative adverbs, there still existssome certain commonality. In the syntactic distribution of theinterrogative adverbs, "难道"demonstrate greater flexibility, itsposition is very flexible, it can appear at beginning of the sentence,in one and at the end of the sentence; it can appear in front of subject,can lie behind subject too, and may use independently. This indicates that"难道"is declarative. "岂"and "何X"can not locate after thesubject. "岂"generally can not use independently , "何必"and "何苦"usually use independently and sometimes "何妨"use independently.In semantic expression, "难道"and "岂"have the same meaning, butthe using style is so different. "难道"is used in spoken Chinese, "岂"is originated from ancient Chinese. The serial of "何X"have the samemorpheme "何",they are interrogative words. But because "X"havecontent, they focus on different semantic point.The second chapter illustrates the consecution situation among thesame kind of the interrogative adverbs and between the interrogativeadverbs and other modal adverbs. Then we discuss the rules of consecution.We also investigate the selectional restriction about the interrogativeadverbs to person, tense and modal verbs. We draw the conclusion that itis the semantic expression of the interrogative adverbs that affects thedifferences of the selectional restriction. We focus on the collocationof the interrogative adverbs and "又", then we conclude that the...