A Study Of Conjectural Assurance And Assured Conjecture Of Modern Chinese

This paper takes conjectural assurance and assured conjecture of modern Chinese as the research objects,selects typical modal verbs and modality adverbs for specific description and analysis.It mainly uses theoretical methods of cognitive linguistics,pragmatics,subjectivity and intersubjectivity to investigate their characteristics in terms of syntactic performance,cognitive semantics and discourse pragmatic functions.The paper consists of five chapters:Chapter One is Introduction,which summarizes the achievements of the present researches and introduces the research content and research methods of this article.Chapter Two is the co-occurrence of conjectural modality and assured modality.The paper distinguishes the two concepts of modality and mood,and make sure that conjecture and assurance belong to the category of modality.As well,this chapter compares some terms such as co-occurrence and collocation,and finds out the types of co-occurrence of conjectural modality and assured modality.At last it determines the research object of this paper.Chapter Three is conjectural assurance.Syntactically,there are two types of co-occurrence: immediate co-occurrence and interval cooccurrence,and different words have different degrees of freedom in syntactic position.In cognitive semantics,conjectural assurance is the conjecture of unrealistic situations and it can represent the causal judgment based on logical semantics.Conjectural assurance also has the effect of weakening and merging modality.In discourse pragmatics,there are some tendentious differences in subject selection and the color of the context.This special way of co-occurrence is related to the use of politeness principles,and has a special expressive effect of contradictory rhetoric.Chapter Four is assured conjecture.Syntactically,there are two kinds:immediate co-occurrence and interval co-occurrence.In cognitive semantics,assured conjecture is used to predict events which are unexpected and with future tense.It can be used in hypothesis complex sentences,causal complex sentences and transition complex sentences.Assured conjecture is the subjective determination and emphasis of possible propositions.Pragmatically,it has the functions of superimposition of epistemic modality and epistemic modality.It also has the effect of text cohesion and confirm understanding.As a whole,conjectural assurance is a definite expression,and assured conjecture is a conjectural expression.The former is a dominant expression.There are also some differences between conjectural assurance and assured conjecture in conversational corpus.Chapter Five is Conclusion which summarizes the study’s viewpoints and points out the shortcomings in the dissertation.