The Study Of "Ran" Modal Adverbs

This thesis investigates "ran" modal adverbs. On the basis of the theory of three-plane, lexicalization and grammaticalization, cognitive linguisitics, discourse linguisitics, markedness and speech act, we adapt the scales for membership degree within words and frequency statistics to have a thorough study of "ran" modal adverbs.This essay puts forward "functional degree of mood" as a new concept including syntactic distribution, co-occurrence with modal particles at the end of sentences,sentence types distribution(This section includes the distribution among traditional sentence types and different speech acts) and internal co-occurrence. In the end, we obtain the "functional degree of mood" of "ran" modal adverbs. The thesis is mainly discussed in six parts:The first part is the introduction. The introduction summarizes the previous research work and makes comments on it. Meanwhile, the introduction gives a definition of "functional degree of mood". Besides, the introduction explains the research orientation, research methods and corpus source.The second part is about the property and range of "ran" modal adverbs. We use the scales for membership degree within words to verify "ran" words in previous research. We also imitate the scale to make another scale for membership degree within modal adverbs. In this way, we determine "juran, jingran, chengran, guran,duanran, guoran, dingran, yanran" as our subjects. At last, we find these "ran" words have different membership degree within modal adverbs.The third part is about the source of "ran" modal adverbs. This section mainlytalks about the process of lexicalization and grammaticalization of "duanran, yanran,and guran". We also study the mechanism behind their lexicalization and grammaticalization.The fourth part is about the first two aspects of "functional degree of mood". We study "ran" modal adverbs’ syntactic distribution and the co-occurrence with modal particles at the end of sentences. In order to emphasize the frequency among each positions, we select randomly 1000 corpus for each "ran" modal adverb from CCL Corpus. We find that the syntactic distribution of "ran" modal adverbs is really flexible. For example, "guoran" has five syntactic positions, that is at the beginning of the sentence with coma, before subject without coma, adverbial, at the end of the sentence and used alone. This section also studys the configuration of foreground and background information of "guoran" in different positions. Besides, we also study "ran" modal adverbs’ co-occurrence with six typical modal particles at the end of sentences. Meanwhile, we will explain reasons for the co-occurrence.The fifth part is about the last two aspects of "functional degree of mood".We study the sentence types and internal co-occurrence of "ran" modal adverbs. The sentence types distribution includes traditional sentence types distribution and speech acts distribution. In this section, we also study the impact of "ran" modal adverbs on illocutionary force in different speech acts. We find that "ran" modal adverbs have a great impact on the strength in achieving communication aims and the strength of sincerity condition, thus changing the whole illocutionary force of one sentence. In addition, we study the internal co-occurrence of "ran" modal adverbs. We find that "ran" modal adverbs seldom co-occur with each other.The last part is the conclusion. In this part, we look back on some main ideas in the essay and point out the deficiency of this thesis.