A Construction Grammar Approach To “Degree Adverb+Noun” Construction In Modern Chinese

In modern Chinese, the “Degree Adverb+ Noun”( abbreviated as “ADV+N”)construction has become popular in the academic fields since its appearance on the Internet, in the magazines, newspapers and literary works, etc. For years, whether it is accepted in grammar has become the focus. Until recently, the concentration has been transferred to its structural interpretation and the reasons for its appearance. Many scholars have done numerous researches on this construction from the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive angles, which make us familiar with many aspects of this construction. Yet, there are few people who are devoted to verifying it from the perspective of construction grammar.This thesis aims to fill this blank and makes some attempts to achieve this goal.On the basis of previous studies, this paper adopts Goldberg’s construction grammar and his coercion theory to analyze and investigate the “Degree Adverb+ Noun” construction in modern Chinese, which aims to probe into the following questions: What are the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of this construction? What’s its constructional meaning?What is the relationship between its constructional meaning and the noun’s lexical meaning?In terms of the methodology, this paper adopts the qualitative method and quantitative method. The representative sentences and phrases mentioned are all collected from daily life,academic monographs, online information, literary works, newspapers or magazines and some large corpora.The major findings are:Firstly, based on the author’s survey, two conclusions can be drawn. One is that the order indicating the frequency of occurrences of the three different kinds of nouns in “ADV+N”construction is like this: abstract nouns > concrete nouns > proper nouns. The other is that thenouns tend to be modified by the degree adverbs which have high degree level, while the lower level ones are seldom used in this construction.Secondly, this construction is a form-meaning pair. Syntactically, the whole construction can act as the grammatical roles of the adverbial, attribute, complement and predicative in a sentence just like what an adjective can do. Semantically, when placed in the “ADV+N”construction, the noun’s lexical meaning has changed from its reference meaning to its attribute meaning. But the semantic meaning of the degree adverb in this construction doesn’t change, which are still used to modify the attribute that can be measured. And the meaning of the whole combination benefits from the lexical meaning of the degree adverb and thus the whole combination can be used to describe the degree of the attribute. Pragmatically, the“ADV+N” construction has the advantages of vividness, conciseness, humor and richness,which can make the language communication much more effective.Thirdly, this combination is a construction in that it conforms to Goldberg’s concept of construction. Its constructional meaning is “describing a certain degree of the attributes in the entity designated by the noun”, which inherits from the meaning of the more schematic“ADV+ADJ” construction.Fourthly, as to the relationship between this combination’s constructional meaning and the noun’s lexical meaning, we will apply Goldberg’s coercion theory. That is, the constructional meaning overrides the reference meaning of nouns and thus the noun’s attribute meaning is profiled. The metonymy of CATEGORY FOR ATTRIBUT works as the inherent cognitive mechanism of the construction coercion.Lastly, based on previous analysis, the author comes to a conclusion, that is, a noun that is admitted into this kind of construction has prominent and conventional attribute meaning,which is also confined by the pragmatic purpose, the related context, subjective construal and other factors.In some ways, this study is beneficial to the development of construction grammar through a better interpretation of the “ADV+N” construction, which shows the superiority of construction grammar. It also proves to be a representative model which can be used to interpret other kinds of Chinese ungrammatical language phenomena.