A DCCM Analysis Of "Adverb+Noun" Construction

Traditional Chinese grammar believes that adverbs do not modify nouns ingeneral. Nevertheless, such kind of expressions as很中国,太林黛玉,很阿Q hasbeen more and more popular in our daily conversation, the mass media and somewritten works in the past few decades. We will not only misconceive it, but achieve afashionable and unusual feeling about it when we hear or see this kind of expressions.Studies at the beginning have firstly taken it as irregular and do not accept theconstruction. They firmly claim that adverb does not take a noun. Later, scholars tryto accept it, but nouns in the construction have been taken as a temporarytransformation of parts of speech in conventional grammar. Studies in recent yearsmostly focus on analyzing the construction from semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, andcognitive perspectives; however, there are few studies concern with the nature of“degree adverb+noun” construction and the cognitive process of “degree adverb+noun” construction interpretation. Therefore, this study aims to analyze how theutterance effect of “degree adverb+noun” construction is achieved from apragma-cognitive perspective by using cognitive linguistic key terms likeConstruction Coercion Theory (CCT), Dynamic Construal Approach (DCA) andMetonymy in order to prove that noun in the construction is still noun.We believe that “degree adverb+noun” construction first obtains its purportmeaning by the Inertial Coercion of regular adverb-adjective. There occurs a LexicalCoercion of the degree adverb to the noun following it. The degree adverb coerces theconnotations of the noun to be salient by Prominence Principle, and we get thepre-meaning of the construction with our encyclopedia knowledge. At last, weachieve its interpretative meaning under the metonymic mechanism within certaincontext. During the last stage, noun has been taken as a container which contains itsproperties. After the specific analysis of three main types of “degree adverb+noun”construction, we find that noun in the construction does not change its part of speech.Based on this, we amend the definition of Chinese adverb, by proposing that some absolute degree adverbs like “很,太,十分” can take nouns in certain context.