A Study Of Boundedness Function With Chinese Adverbs

This study makes an attempt to probe into the core function of Chinese adverbs from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.Based on the related literature,it is shown that the previous studies of Chinese adverbs tend to fall into two types:the type of macroscopic analysis and the other one of microscopic exploration.However,there is no coherent view of the core function of Chinese adverbs.The consensus linguists have arrived at is that the prototypical Chinese adverbs are those equipped with the meaning of time,degree,modal and scope respectively and the function of Chinese adverbs is closely related to the predicative head a Chinese adverb modifies.Consequently,in order to smooth the way for unveiling the intrinsic features of Chinese adverbs,the prototypical sub-categories of Chinese adverbs are targeted at in the first place.Following that,a further inquiry is conducted to identify the boundedness with the Chinese predicative structure,on the grounds that a linguistic structure must be properly boundarized as an event structure,for any unboundarization is likely to bring about the destruction of a whole structure,i.e.a gestalt.(Liu,2006)It is found that the boundedness with verbs concerning the domain of instantiation(i.e.temporal)is not self-contained and they need other grammatical devices to make it up.After a detailed review,it can be seen that the methods availably offered by the previous studies pertaining to the boundedness with the predicative structure in a Chinese sentence do not incorporate adverbs into their research domain.In light of the truth that the boundedness of English predicative structures is possible through the use of adverbs,Chinese adverbs are to be deemed as a factor of great relevance.It must be taken into consideration in terms of discussions concerning the boundedness of Chinese predicative structures.To this regard,based on the States of Boundedness(Talmy,2000)and the Matching Principle(Shen,2004),both the Absoluteness Principle and the Relativity Principle are proposed as the theoretical framework to verify the relationship between the Chinese adverbs and the Chinese predicative structures.At length,within this theoretical framework,the cognitive mechanism underlying the core function of Chinese adverbs has been figured out along the dimension of different sub-categories of prototypical Chinese adverbs.Based upon the above research,it is concluded that the prototypical sub-categories of Chinese adverbs are those equipped with the meaning of time,degree,modal and scope respectively.However,the so-called modal adverbs differ greatly from the prototypical adverbs Therefore,this types of adverbs is not included into the on-going research,and the research mainly focus on the prototypical adverbs,namely the time-adverbs,the scope-adverbs and the degree-adverbs.Then,it is found that notwithstanding the different sub-types of Chinese adverbs,the core function of them are the same.In other words,taking three sub-types of Chinese adverbs into consideration,the core function of them is to make predicative heads bounded in different cognitive domains.That is,the adverbs possess the ability to make unbounded predicative structures bounded,and also assign different meanings to the predicative structure and make a sentence grammatically correct in various domains.The thesis concludes by claiming that the research is of some implication to the studies on Chinese adverbs especially with respect to second language acquisition.Besides,since this research employs the theories of Cognitive Linguistics as the theoretical basis,the research results drawn are likely to lend some support to the valid explanatory power of Cognitive Linguistics.It is also hoped that the study will shed some light on the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language(especially the grammar teaching)in relation to the construction of some Chinese sentences.