A Corpus-driven Contrastive Study Of "Degree Adverb+Noun" In Chinese And English

The structure of “Degree Adverb + Noun” refers to a language phenomenon of degree adverb modifying noun.Since the 1980 s,it has become more and more popular and used in literature works,newspapers,film and television programs as well as on the Internet.Recently more and more scholars are interested in the study of the structure of “Degree Adverb + Noun” for its vivid and direct expressive ways as well as colorful and rich semantic connotation,and a large number of related research papers have been published as a result.This thesis applies the corpus-driven research method and takes advantage of the popular online corpus to collect and collate large amounts of practical linguistic examples with the purpose of developing a contrastive analysis of it and identifying the similarities and differences between them.The study shows that compared to English “Degree Adverb + Noun”,it is relatively more employed in Chinese with wide range and various types although both of them contain the characteristics of explicit expressive and rich semantic connotation.English “Degree Adverb + Noun” is contrastively found to remain in the oral corpus with limited covering and has not been widely used.For the different and distinctive linguistic characteristics between Chinese and English,it conforms to the grammatical rule in terms of Chinese language,but it is not the case for use the “Degree Adverb + Noun”structure without changing the part of speech of English language.By using corpus-driven method,this thesis enriches the corpora of Chinese and English “Degree Adverb + Noun”,breaks some limitations on the analysis of “Degree Adverb + Noun” phenomenon of just citing some subjective examples in previous studies,perfects the Chinese-English analysis of it and more importantly lays some foundations for future research.The thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction part,introducing the research background,objectives and significance of the study,research methods and the structure of this thesis.The second chapter is literature review,conducting a historic and present studies of the Chinese and English degree adverb and the language phenomenon of “Degree Adverb + Noun” and points out some limitations of the contemporary study.The third chapter is one of the central parts of this thesis,which is concerned with the retrieval and statistics of corpora,including the selection of Chinese degree adverb and English degree adverb as well as the statistics of Chinese and English “Degree Adverb + Noun” corpora search results by applying Regular Expression.The fourth chapter is the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English “Degree Adverb + Noun”.A great number of examples are compared and the similarities and differences are analyzed.Finally the reasons to explain the differences between Chinese and English “Degree Adverb + Noun” structure are summed up respectively.The fifth chapter is the conclusion section which analyzes and summarizes the contrastive analysis of “Degree Adverb + Noun” in Chinese and English and further indicates the limitations of the thesis.