A Study On The "Best" Of Modal Adverbs

In contemporary Chinese language, there are many controversies and questions about modal adverbs, they have distinct individual characters in grammatical meaning, semantic direction, pragmatic feature, text and so on. In this paper, our research object is the modal adverb “zuihao” which can express the meaning of advising. Based on the language data, we investigate the syntactic distribution, semantic feature, pragmatic function and diachronic development of the modal adverb “zuihao”. Except the introduction and conclusion, the paper divides into five chapters.Chapter one describes and analyzes the syntactic distribution and applicable environment of “zuihao”. We study it from three aspects: distribution location, collocation and applicable sentence type. In addition, this chapter explains other relevant phenomena, such as the semantic features of the verbs which appear with “zuihao”, the different characters of “shi” and “haishi” which always use after “zuihao”.Chapter two investigates the co-occurrence coordination and collocation of “zuihao” and other adverbs, mainly discussed in three aspects: highlight the front, collocation of the same category, combination and co-occurrence. We carefully study the modal adverb “zuihao” s collocation with other adverbs, other modal adverbs and the constraints, also, we study the collocation and co-occurrence of the modal adverbs denoting “advise”.Chapter three analyzes the means of expression and persuading functions of “zuihao”, divides in three elements, the first one introduces the semantic feature and character of “zuihao”, the second one discusses the commentary scope and object of “zuihao” in a sentence and the third one investigates the pragmatic function and subjectivity of “zuihao”.Chapter four studies the diachronic development of “zuihao”, analyzes its lexicalization reasons from common factors and personality factors, and discusses whether it becomes a pragmatic marker or not.Chapter five discusses the differences of “zuihao” with other co-generic modal adverbs. We choose three representatives “bufang” “hebi” and “haishi”, investigate their differences from commentary angle and semantic intensity in order to deepen our understanding about “zuihao”.