A Study Of Degree Expressions Of Degree Verbs In Modern Chinese

Through the CCL corpus of Peking University and the corpus of national committee of Chinese language and culture,this paper searched 1223 verbs in the Chinese Verb Usage Dictionary of Meng Cong and some verbs in the seventh edition of the Modern Chinese Dictionary and found that many verbs have the characteristics of expressing degree meaning.Through the investigation of the corpus,we find that the degree expression of the verb includes three aspects: vocabulary,grammar and pragmatics.Therefore,we put forward the concept of degree verbs,which itself has degree meaning,or can be used to express degree meaning through degree adverbial,degree complement,or frame structure.Through the collection and arrangement of the corpus,we find a total of 649 degree verbs.According to the differences in degree expressions,we divide degree verbs into zero-dimensional degree verbs,one-dimensional degree verbs,two-dimensional degree verbs and three-dimensional degree verbs,and investigate the degree expressions of various degree verbs on the basis of classification.Among them,there are 145zero-dimensional degree verbs,which have degree meaning in themselves and do not need other forms to express degree meaning.There are 319one-dimensional degree verbs,and the expression of degree and degree meaning of one-dimensional degree verbs are single,so their degree is the weakest.There are 147 two-dimensional degree verbs,they can express degree meaning through two grammatical forms,and according to the expression of degree meaning,two-dimensional verbs and can be divided into restrictive degree verbs and relative freedom degree verbs.The restrictive degree verbs can only expressing only the highest degree meaning,while the relative freedom degree verbs can express different levels of degree meaning,so the expression of degree is more free.There are 38three-dimensional verbs,they can express degree meaning through three syntactic forms and according to the freedom of degree meaning's expression,we put them into relative freedom three-dimensional degree verbs which can expressing only the highest degree meaning,and absolute freedom three-dimensional degree verbs that can express different levels of degree meaning.The absolute freedom three-dimensional degree verbs are almost psychological verbs,and their degree expression and express of degree meaning are the freest,so their degree is the strongest.