A Contrastive Study On The Construction "Degree Adverb+Emotional Adjective" Between English And Chinese

Emotion is one of the basic forms of human psychological activity.Positive emotional adjectives and negative emotional adjectives are used to express human emotions.The studies on emotional adjectives at home and abroad are concerning psychology and neuroscience.At the linguistic level,the studies involve the semantic features of emotional adjectives and the collocation of emotional adjectives and nouns.Construction is an indispensable part of the human language inventory.Constructions of emotional adjectives with degree adverbs express the intensity of feelings.This study intends to dig deeper into the construction “Degree Adverb + Emotional Adjective”,to explore the similarities and differences of the collocation rules between degree adverbs and emotional adjectives in Chinese and English,as well as the link to psychology and cognition in depth.In this study,CCL corpus and COCA corpus are used to collect language materials and two corpora are built.The qualitative method is used in contrastive analysis of the construction “Degree Adverb + Emotional Adjective”.The major findings of this study are as follows:(1)In terms of the collocation rules of degree adverbs and emotional adjectives,English and Chinese emotional adjectives gaoxing,nanguo,happy and sad can be collocated with adverbs of different degrees to express the intensity of emotions.The collocation frequency of the four emotional adjectives with extreme degree adverbs is low,while with non-extreme degree adverbs is high.(2)The cognitive reason for it is that both emotional adjectives and degree adverbs are gradable,and the construal of the language user is based on the similarity in the domain of gradability.The mapping between emotional adjectives and degree adverbs is related to the construal of boundaries.The four adjectives in this study are mostly used with unbounded degree adverbs.However,due to the degree feature of emotion and individual psychological differences,emotional adjectives can be combined with bounded degree adverbs,although the frequency is low.(3)By contrast,it is found that the positive or negative semantics tendency of emotional adjectives also affects their collocations with degree adverbs.Positive emotional adjectives are more often collocated with unbounded degree adverbs,and the frequency of collocation of negative emotional adjectives and bounded degree adverbs is higher than that of positive emotion.The difference in the collocation of construction “Degree Adverb + Emotional Adjective” in English and Chinese is mainly reflected in the emotional intensifiers.There are more emotional intensifiers in English than in Chinese.On the whole,the frequency of the use of positive emotional adjectives is much higher than that of negative emotional adjectives,and there is an imbalance between the cognitive domains of positive and negative emotions.This study links language expression with human cognition,which enriches the study concerning emotional adjectives and degree adverbs.At the same time,it can help language speakers understand the similarities and differences in the use of emotional adjectives in the two languages and know about the cognitive mechanism in emotional expression,thus promoting the language use in real life.