A Study Of The Variation Of Adverbs Of Degree+Noun Structure In Spoken Chinese

With the further development of reform and opening up, China has made significant progress in economic, social and sociocultural aspects, and the contact among different areas are becoming more and more frequently, thus as the times require, a lot of new language expressions emerge and diffuse rapidly. The Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure is one of the new syntactic variations and linguistic expressions influenced by the language own development and contact with other languages.The study analyzes the usage of Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure from the perspective of sociolinguistic variation. With the methods of interview and observation, 98people’s daily speech who are living or working in Xuchang is investigated, the author has collected 278 sentence examples of Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure, then analyzed them from the social variables respectively, for example, gender, age, occupation and education background. After that, a questionnaire survey on people’s attitudes to the use of Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure is conducted as a supplement. Lastly, using the statistical methods,all the data collected are analyzed to figure out the structure’s distribution in people’s daily life with the help of softwares such as GoldVarb, Excel(2007) and SPSS(16.0).This study mainly discusses the following three questions:(1) What is the usage of Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure in people’s daily life?(2) Whether the usage of Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure is related to social variables, such as age, gender,occupation, educational background?(3) What are people’s attitudes towards the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure?It is found that the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure is widely used in people’s daily life now and has already been a steady linguistic phenomenon for the influence of the language own development and social factors. The adverbs can’t modify the nouns generally,but the deep adverbs of degree in the structure of Adverbs of Degree + Noun, for example,HEN, FEICHANG, TAI, have a relatively high frequency of utilization.Influenced by the linguistic grammaticalization which is a universal phenomenon during the long evolution of language, the deep adverbs of degree gradually lose the limitation to the following head-words. While among the four types of nouns in the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure,the abstract nouns have the highest frequency of occurrence, but the concrete nouns come second, the proper and other nouns are relatively rare, taking the lowest frequency of occurrence. The use and distribution of the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure are also influenced by the social variables, the females have a higher tendency to accept and use thestructure than males, the age group of 21-35 uses more Adverbs of Degree + Noun structures,the informants with the education of university take the highest proportion of the total tokens,among the occupations, the students are more easily to accept the structure due to their open-minded. The combined effect of the linguistic causes and the social causes pushes the development and spread of the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure,the former includes results of linguistic grammaticalization and the semantic features of nouns, while the latter contains the influence from media and the dialects of Hong Kong and Cantonese.The structure of Adverbs of Degree + Noun has turned into a steady grammatical linguistic phenomenon now, thus conducting a systemic analysis and empirical research on it can help people fully understand the usage of the Adverbs of Degree + Noun structure in people’s daily life, and enrich the variation studies, then provide a direction for the following studies on such structures.