A Study Of Semantic Shift Of Neutral Nouns From A Degree Semantics Perspective

In modern Chinese,some neutral nouns often show semantic shifts in some aspects of speech.This article studies the semantic shift phenomenon of neutral nouns from the perspective of degree semantics.The article is divided into five parts.Part Ⅰ: Introduction.This chapter introduces the origin and significance of the study,sorts out the current status of the study,and gives an account of the theoretical basis,research methods,research objects and corpus sources of this study.Part Ⅱ: Semantic shift types of neutral nouns.There are two types: one is attribute shift,which can be divided into two sub-categories: explicit shift and implicit shift,such as "minute","opinion",etc.The second is the magnitude offset,which can be divided into three subcategories: measurement offset(such as "level","speed",etc.),evaluation offset(such as "quality" "moisture",etc.),and offsets with both measurement and evaluation(e.g.,"specification","weight",etc.).Part Ⅲ: Characteristics of neutral nouns in which the shift occurs.The semantic shift of neutral nouns is often found in the combination with verbs.These verbs include "enough","is","have","like","into",etc.The resulting "V+N-in" structure is mainly used as a predicate,determiner and complement.Some components that are both verbs and adverbs can also be combined with N-in,such as "enough + N-in".Semantically,the "V+N-in" structure is characterized by [+measure],[+attribute] and[+rank].Linguistically,the "V+N-in" structure has the features and functions of highlighting the focus,enhancing the variety of expressions,and constructing complex contexts.Part Ⅳ: Mechanism of semantic offset of neutral nouns.Semantically,the[+nature] meaning and [+measure] meaning of the neutral noun itself are the conditions for the shift,and the direction of the shift is either bi-directional or uni-directional.Grammatically,the "V+N-in" and "adverb+N-in" structures can be regarded as conditions for the semantic shift of neutral nouns.The "V+N-medium" structure diminishes the grammatical character of the N-medium as a noun,and the N-medium loses its status as a part-of-speech referent and has a strong character of transferring to an atypical grammatical category,and these changes in the grammatical character of the N-medium are the concomitant conditions of its semantic shift.The structure of "adverb + N" shifts the semantics of N by means of indirect or direct transformations.Pragmatically,the subjective evaluative context is the condition for the semantic shift in N.At present,the basic understanding of this paper is that the "V+N-in" structure is often used in comparative sentences,exclamations,and other contexts containing evaluative meanings.Part Ⅴ: Motivation of semantic drift of neutral nouns.Cognitively,the semantic meaning of neutral nouns can be shifted toward negative or positive meaning,which is related to objective correlation and purely subjective intentional correlation.The change of specific nouns from accusative to descriptive evaluative meaning is related to social conventions.In the "V+N-in" structure,the use of the "incremental" sense of the verb in affirmative evaluation and the atypical feature of the N-in are together driving the interpretation of the semantic shift.Pragmatically,users resist both the quantitative and modal norms,and neutral nouns are interpreted as deviant semantics through acts of resistance in use.We observe that the semantic shift of neutral nouns is predominantly positive,even if the shift to negative is expressed by euphemism,such as "fox",which can be interpreted as a result of people’s subjective favorable psychology.Part Ⅵ: Conclusion.Summarize the main contents and reflect on the shortcomings of this paper.