earticle

영어

The Chinese degree adverbs comprise a closed set derived mainly from the content words and enrich the vocabularies. In this paper we specifically aim to investigate the levels of grammaticalization of four new degree adverbs “chāo” “zéi” “mán” “jù” in terms of their frequencies of use as adverbs and their variations in sentence structures. To answer the above questions, we have examined 1000 tokens for each new adverb from three Chinese corpus being commonly used. Considering the low percentage in the frequency of their uses as adverbs and their preferences for simple structures instead of compound ones, it is claimed that the grammaticalization level of the four new degree adverbs is still in the low stage. From the corpus data, it is shown that among the four words, three of them are nearly in the low stages of grammaticalization except for “mán” in the intermediate stage. Their dominant sentence structure is the same basic simple one as conventional degree adverbs instead of more complicated compound structures. Furthermore it is claimed that their preferences for parts of phrases as a kind of function words rather than their uses as a single word also indicate the low stages of grammaticalization for the four adverbs. In addition, their uses as degree adverbs depend on the genres and are more preferable in online language and media platforms. Hence it is concluded that the grammaticalization of all four words is still at a relatively low level and depends on various factors. We hope that this study will make modest contributions for those who want to look into the development and functions of the Chinese degree adverbs.