Analyzing Chinese Adverbs Expressing Confirmation In Discourse Model-Shizai,Dique And Zhende

Chinese adverbs shizai,dique and zhende are all defined as adverbs expressing confirmation,but they are actually quite different and have their own distinctive features.The comparative studies on shizai,dique and zhende are popular among researches on Chinese adverbs.Earlier attempts often adopt a descriptive linguistic method and generalize their characteristics from perspectives of semantics,syntax and pragmatics based on their distributions in corpora.In recent years,inspired by the investigations on the adverbs expressing confirmation in the field of formal linguistics,some scholars start to adopt the formal method to study their Chinese counterparts.The previous research shows that formal study on the Chinese adverbs expressing confirmation is yet to be further developed.Therefore,the major research questions of the present thesis are as follows:(i)Are dique and zhende presupposition triggers? Are the emphatic readings really due to the presuppositions? If not,how can we characterize the meaning of the sentences with dique and zhende in discourse model in a right way?(ii)What are the differences between shizai on the one hand and dique,zhende on the other hand? What is the core meaning of shizai? How can we characterize it in discourse model?As for research question(i),thorough a detailed comparison between presupposition and conventional implicature,we argue that dique and zhende are not presupposition triggers but expressions carrying conventional implicatures.Specifically,dique requires the proposition in the sentence has been suggested in the previous discourse,while zhende requires that the proposition in the sentence has been suggested in the previous discourse,and that this issue has not been agreed upon by all the discourse participants.Moreover,their emphatic readings are not due to presuppositions.Instead,dique and zhende are intensifiers at the level of speech act.They boost the degree of strength of the sincerity conditions of the speech act of the relevant utterance.We improve Farkas & Bruce’s(2010)discourse model so as to characterize these distinctive properties of dique and zhende in a better way.As for research question(ii),we first make a conclusion on the systematic differences between shizai and dique,zhende.There are two major differences.One is discourse position: shizai is used in the initial position in a conversation while dique and zhende are allowed in the responsive move.The other is sentential restrictions:shizai sentences suggest subjectivity and gradability while dique and zhende suggest no such characteristics.Furthermore,shizai is by nature expressing the speaker’s affirmation that the degree of the gradability in the sentence reaches the extreme point.Shizai is a speaker-oriented adverb,and it contributes nothing to the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence.In view of these,the extreme-point meaning of shizai is formalized by Multidimensional Semantics(Gutzmann 2015).Besides,we make reference to the treatment of subjective assertions in Beltrama(2018)and combine it with Farkas & Bruce’s(2010)discourse model to characterize the performance of shizai in the discourse.In summary,we probe into the differences of dique,zhende,and shizai in meaning,which helps people give a better understanding of them.In addition,formal approaches are applied to characterize their contributions to the discourse.It is hoped that our proposals and research methods can inspire the later studies on Chinese adverbs expressing confirmation.