Evaluating the ambiguity phenomenon of adverbs

Author: Tian Yuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: This small book was revised and completed based on the author's doctoral dissertation. The usage of the modern Chinese adverb "jiu" is quite complex, and its function as an evaluative adverb has been extensively discussed. This book employs corpus analysis and listening tests to conduct a comparative analysis of the different usages of the evaluative adverb "jiu" on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, hoping to provide a new perspective for the study of "jiu." The book examines the reasons for the ambiguity of the evaluative adverb "jiu" from the levels of grammar, semantics, and pragmatics. Through the testing and analysis of a 1.5 million-word corpus using the corpus query software PCTMD, it summarizes the syntactic structural characteristics of the evaluative adverb "jiu" and proposes methods to avoid ambiguity, such as phonetic stress, contextual setting, and synonym substitution. This research outcome holds certain theoretical and applied value for Chinese linguistic studies and teaching Chinese as a second language. The findings of this study are based on the analysis of actual corpus data.