"adverbs Of Degree + Vp" Study

For a long time, degree adverbs have always been considered to modify adjectives and psychological verbs. However, we found that being modified by degree adverbs is not just the privilege of psychological verbs. Besides, not all psychological verbs can be modified by degree adverbs. Degree adverbs can modify some non-psychological verbs and verb phrases. This paper focuses on the phenomenon, and tries to explain it.First, based on the previous research done by other scholars, we describe this language phenomenon by searching Beijing University Corpus and NCCC (National Chinese Committee of China) Corpus, and find that degree adverbs can modify psychological state verbs, some action verbs,"Xiang-si"verbs and modal verbs. Besides the verbs, degree adverbs can modify verb phrases, such as"Dong-bin"phrases,"Zhuang-zhong"phrases,"Jian-yu"phrases,"Lian-he"phrases and so on.Secondly, we analyze this language phenomenon from the views of semantics and syntax, and find that the verbs and verb phrases being modified by degree adverbs have two semantic features, [+character] and [+gradable]. The verbs modified by degree adverbs can not be followed by"zhe","le1"and"guo", and can not be modified by"zai"and"zhengzai". Besides, the verbs modified by degree adverbs can not be followed by complement of frequency and time. Finally, we explain this phenomenon a little bit by some theories of cognitive linguistics, and draw a conclusion that the combination of degree adverbs and verbs or verb phrases is reasonable. We predict that the structure will be accepted and used by more and more people.