A Study Of The Syntax-Semantics Interface Of English And Chinese Frequency Adverbs

This thesis attempts to study the syntactic and semantic interface of English and Chinese frequency adverbs from the perspective of morphological distribution characteristics within the framework of generative linguistics.By introducing the Theory of Distributed Morphology from Halle & Marantz(1993),Marantz(1997),Hale & Keyser(1993,1998,2002),Harley &Noyer(1999),Arad(2003),Embick & Noyer(2007),which will syntactically interpret the lexicon and profoundly reveal the syntactic properties of lexical term,this thesis is aimed to solve the existing problems of concept and syntax-semantics interface of English and Chinese frequency adverbs.First of all,referring to the existing researches,with the help of BNC corpus and CCL corpus,based on the most commonly used 20 English frequency adverbs in BNC corpus and 35 Chinese frequency adverbs selected from related major researches from 1981-2004,this thesis discusses frequency adverbs from semantic features of verbs which can be collocated with frequency adverbs in sentences.Secondly,through the generation and derivation of frequency adverbs,the combinatorial and emerging properties of frequency adverbs are studied.Syntactic position and semantic features of frequency adverbs are further discussed.Finally,combined with the theory of Distributed Morphology(DM)and sub-thematic structure,this thesis analyzes the operation process of external and internal merging of English and Chinese frequency adverbs in syntax-semantics interfaces and compares the syntax-semantics interface operations of English and Chinese frequency adverbs.Through study,the thesis draws the following conclusions: 1)English and Chinese frequency adverbs are not the original terms in the lexicon,but the emerging concept in the syntactic merging operation of notional words and the functional words.2)English and Chinese frequency adverbs can be taken as sub-thematic structure,so frequency adverbs are common in the meaning structure and sentence structure.3)English and Chinese frequency adverbs can be understood as internal integration operations from PP to Adv.