A Comparative Study Of Probable Adverbial Conjunctions In Chinese And English

This thesis focuses on the comparative study of probable adverbial conjunctions in Chinese(“也许”,“或许”,“兴许”,“可能”,and“大概”)and English(probably,perhaps,possibly,likely,and maybe).Owing to the extensive application of this type of adverbs through oral and written discourses expressing uncertainty or doubt,it is of great significance that our attempting to explore similarities,dissimilarities,and some regular rules in their syntactic,semantic,pragmatic and textual functions respectively and comprehensively.Besides,on the basis of the authentic data collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU,both the quantitative study and the qualitative analysis are conducted in this thesis.Aiming at exploring their similar and different syntactic,semantic,as well as textual and pragmatic features of probable adverbial conjunctions,this study has found out and explained the major findings as follows:1.In the syntactic aspect,despite that both languages occupy a tendency in the initial and middle position,English enjoys a more complicated and diversified position possibilities,and its favorably used order is probably>possibly>likely>perhaps>maybe(“>”means“antecedent to”),and a much more flexible variety and richness in expressions than that of Chinese,whose preferred order of the occurrence can be summarized as:“也许”>“大概”/“或许”>“可能”>“兴许”;2.In the semantic aspect,on the premise of closely similar meanings within these words,Chinese probable adverbial conjunctions are more dynamic,open,and relying on the communicative context,with a preferred order in the diversity of semantic configurations as:“也许”>“可能”>“大概”/“或许”>“兴许”.While for English equivalents,that is probably/perhaps>likely>possibly/maybe.Additionally,adverbial conjunctions in both languages connect the preceding clause with the following one in a commonly expressed sense relation,such as adversative,condition,cause and effect;3.In the pragmatic aspect,probable adverbial conjunctions mainly have four pragmatic functions,namely,informationfocus marking function,discourse marking function,emphatic and subjectivisation function;4.In the textual cohesion function,the functions of probable adverbial conjunctions are embodied in reference,ellipsis and substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion.They are noticeably apparent in the coherent texts of the discourse analysis.