A Comparative Study Of Adverbs Of Probable Modality In Modern Chinese

Academic circles have made remarkable achievements in the study of adverbs.As a small category of adverbs,modal adverbs have made a lot of achievements,but there are not many comparative studies on modal adverbs with similar meanings.This thesis takes probabilistic modal adverbs as the main research object,based on structuralism and functionalist linguistic theories,and draws on the research methods of subjectivity and subjectivity,grammaticalization,Lexicalization and minimal comparative equivalence.This thesis studies the differences in syntax,semantics and expressive functions of probabilistic modal adverbs from a micro-perspective,and explores the semantic sources of probabilistic modal adverbs from a macro-perspective.This thesis is divided into seven parts.The first part is the introduction,which defines the research object and scope.This thesis briefly describes the current research situation in China,expounds the innovations and significance of the study,and briefly introduces the source of the corpus and the theoretical methods of this paper.The second part is a comparative study of modal adverbs"Yexu"(也许)and"Xingxu"(兴许).This part mainly compares the differences between"Yexu"and"Xingxu"from the perspectives of syntax,semantics,subjectivity and evidentiality.The third part is a comparative study of modal"Bacheng"(八成)and"Duoban"(多半).Firstly,semantically,"Bacheng"is a modal adverb with strong evidentiality,which expresses a probability."Duoban"is a modal adverb with weak evidentiality,which expresses a possibility.Secondly,from the perspective of event tense,sentence category selection and stylistic distribution,there are also some differences between them.The fourth part is a comparative study of modal adverbs"Haoxiang"(好像)and"Sihu"(似乎).This part focuses on the analysis of the syntax and semantics of"Haoxiang"and"Sihu".Both of them are suspicious,expressing a probable subjective mood,"Haoxiang"expressing an interactive subjectivity,"Sihu"expressing a subjectivity.The fifth part is a comparative study of modal adverbs"Shuobuding"(说不定)and"Shuobuzhun"(说不准).This part mainly examines the differences in the syntactic structure,possible cognitive modality and pragmatic functions between the two.Finally,the relationship between grammaticalization and grammaticalization is explored.The sixth part explores four sources of cognitive modality from the perspective of diachronic evolution.Semantically,"Yexu" and "Xingxu","Bacheng" and "Duoban","Haoxiang" and "Sihu" as well as "Shuobuding" and "Shuobuzhun" can all express a possible modality,but they have different sources of cognitive modality.The seventh part is the conclusion,which summarizes the main points of this article and points out the shortcomings of the thesis.