Study Of The Function And The Collocation Conditions Of "Expressions Of Degree" In Japanese

There are a lot of expressions that describe degree in Japanese, we call those "expressions of degree". Among all the "expressions of degree", "adverbs of degree" is the most common ones. For example, " sukoshi", "totemo", "hijyouni" etc. In addition, "expressions of degree" also include the "te-form" of adjective and some phrases. As "mecyakucya", "bakani", "kuso", "shinuhodo" are used widely recently, "expressions of degree" has showed the trend of multilization.Two years ago, when I went to Japan for my graduate studies for the first time. I heard the word "satujinteki" and had a strong interest in it. Therefore, I did a initial survey about "satujinteki", and I found out that "Satujinteki" is an adjective with the lexical meaning of "serious as life is threatened; the degree is very high". While "Satujinteki" also has a negative estimated meaning. However, when it modifies other words, the estimated meaning changes to neutral or positive sometimes. Furthermore, "satujinteki" has four forms of conjugation. The thesis below discussed into details the word "satujinteki" with modification "X".First, we illustrate reasons, purposes, objects and methods of the research. By making a unique corpus (we call it the "satujinteki" corpus) and tagging the information about "satujinteki", we found out the regular pattern among of sentences with "satujinteki".Chapter One explains the process about how to make the "satujinteki" corpus in details. Particularly, a complete description on account of the tags was made.As the key part of the thesis, Chapter Two explores the correlation between the lexicial meaning of X and the lexicial meaning of "satujinteki+X". Referring to the system for lexicial classification of Kudo(1995) and Janpanese Gramma Seminar(2010), the character of X was analyzed in details with each form of "satujinteki".Similar to Chapter Two, Chapter Three studies the correlation between the estimated meaning of X and the estimated meaning of "satujinteki+X". The so-called "estimated meaning" refers to that whether a word is negative, neutral or postive. The majority of X modified by "satujinteki" has a negative estimated meaning. However, there are also X with a postive estimated meaning. To explain this phenomenon, the concept of "decategorialization" was introduced.Different from the traditional definition, we redefine the decategorialization in this research. By comparing with "taihen", we made a conclusion that "satujinteki" is an adjective in theory, but it is used as an adverb in practical application. Therefore, we can reach the conclusion that "satujinteki" is in the process of decategorialization.To sum up, by pointing out the function and the collocation conditions of "satujinteki", this thesis probes the decategorialization of a series of "expressions of degree", such as "mecyakucya", "shinuhodo", "kuso", "bakani" etc, as well as "satujinteki", these expressions of degree are all in the process of decategorialization.