A Typological Study Of Adverbs

From the perspective of linguistic typology,this thesis is mainly aimed at making a comparative study of the word order of the adverbs in English,Chinese,Japanese and Korean,mainly from four aspects: 1)a cross-linguistically suitable classification of adverbs;2)the word order of one single predicate adverb(before or after the predicate)in a sentence;3)the word order of the co-occurrence of adverbs in a sentence;and 4)the echoing structure between some of the adverbs and the ATM system.In the study,some of the examples in English,Chinese,Japanese and Korean are selected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),Chinese National Corpus(CNC),Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese(BCCWJ),and Korean National Corpus/Sejong Corpus(SJC),respectively.Through analyzing and studying,the study,based on the predecessors,establishes a cross-linguistically suitable classification of adverbs,namely: 1)speech-act adverbs,2)evaluative adverbs,3)epistemic adverbs,4)temporal location adverbs,5)aspectual adverbs,6)manner adverbs and 7)degree adverbs,with 1)-3)regarded as sentence adverbs and 4)– 7)as predicate adverbs.Taking the predicate(or verb)as the core parameter,the study finds out that: 1.Temporal location adverbs in Chinese,Japanese and Korean appear before the predicates,while those in English have the inclination to appear after the predicates.2.Aspectual adverbs in the four languages are inclined to occur before the predicates.3.Manner adverbs in Chinese,Japanese and Korean precede the predicates while those in English are apt to appear after.4.Degree adverbs in Japanese and Korean appear before the predicates while those in English and Chinese have the implication to appear before the predicate.After examining the word order of the co-occurrence of adverbs in a sentence,the study comes the conclusion that: 5.The unmarked of the word order is: speech-act > evaluative(Spk)> epistemic > temporal 1 > aspectual > degree > manner/evaluative(Eve)> temporal 2.6.The similarities are caused by “Semantic Distance Iconicity Principle” and “Cross-category Harmony Principle”,while the differences can be attributed to the interplay of “Identifiability-leading Principle” and “Focus-postposing”.Moreover,the study also makes a description on the ATM(aspect,tense and modality)system,and puts forth that the temporal location adverbs,aspectual adverbs and epistemic adverbs can echo with the tense,aspect,and epistemic modality,respectively.7.The word order of the ATM system can be extracted as “(English)Modality > Tense > Aspect > V > Aspect > Tense > Modality(Chinese,Japanese and Korean)”.