Research On Pragmatic Acquisition Of Adverbs Of Degree By Chinese-as-A-Second-Language Learners

This paper adopts the behavioral experiment method in psychological linguistics to study the characteristics of Chinese-as-a-second-language learners in pragmatic acquisition of"有点".It separately explores the semantic basis for the mechanism under which Chinese-as-asecond-language learners interpret the grade meaning of"有点"and the impact of language context on such mechanism.In Experiment 1,we study the interpretation of the degree domain of gradable words"有点"by Chinese-as-a-second-language learners.As shown by result,the understanding about the definition of"有点"by Chinese-as-a-second-language learners without language context goes beyond the original literary meaning.This suggests that as Chinese-as-a-second-language learners are subject to language context for a long time,the learners do not limit the semantic meaning of"有点"to a fixed degree;instead,like native speakers,the learners believe that the lower limit for the semantic meaning of"有点"is larger than zero,and the upper limit for the semantic meaning can denote"very"or"greatly".In Experiment 2,we study the interpretation of the grade meaning of"有点"by Chineseas-a-second-language learners under language context of lower and upper-limit sentences.As indicated by result,the grade meaning of"有点"in the view of Chinese-as-a-second-language learners has much to do with language context.This shows that grade meaning results from semantic negotiation between speaker and listener and can’t be separated from language context.With this as a guide,this paper proceeds from the construction of language context to offer four teaching suggestions on the grade meaning of"有点"for Chinese learners:"strengthening semantic understanding,guiding output","designing comparisons,reinforcing discrimination","building a context,understanding pragmatic functions"and"creating scenarios,making discourse complementation".It is expected to,by taking"有点"as an example,provide a new teaching thinking for teaching on gradable adverbs in Chinese.