Tài liệu Syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in english and chinese

2019– 2021 (2) MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY ENGLISH LANGUAGE M.A. THESIS SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF ADVERBS OF DEGREE IN ENGLISH AND IN CHINESE (Đặc điểm cú pháp và ngữ nghĩa của trạng từ chỉ mức độ trong tiếng Anh và tiếng Trung Quốc) NGUYỄN THỊ NGUYỆT NGUYỄN THỊ NGUYỆT Field: ENGLISH LANGUAGE Code: 8.22.02.01 HANOI – 2022 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY M.A. THESIS SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF ADVERBS OF DEGREE IN ENGLISH AND IN CHINESE (Đặc điểm cú pháp và ngữ nghĩa của trạng từ chỉ mức độ trong tiếng Anh và tiếng Trung Quốc) NGUYỄN THỊ NGUYỆT Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01 Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. HOANG TUYET MINH HANOI – 2022 i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled “Syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Language. Except where the reference is indicated, no other person’s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis. Hanoi, 2022 Nguyễn Thị Nguyệt Approved by SUPERVISOR Date: …………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this study is a result of the support and encouragement from several people. I would like to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to them for their precious help and support. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my admirable advisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Tuyet Minh for the continuous support and motivation and for her comments and suggestions during the study. Her stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly through my growth as an academic researcher. My thanks also go to all my lecturers at Hanoi Open University for their precious knowledge which lay the foundation for this study, my colleagues and many others whose support and encouragement help me to have this thesis accomplished. My sincere thanks also go to my HOU 2019-2021(2) classmates, in particular my close ones, who always encouraged and helped me solve the problems which occurred during the study Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family and friends for their patience, endless love, and devotion. Whatever choices I have made, they have always stood by me and believed in me. I am immensely thankful for all the assistance they have given to me. This accomplishment would not have been possible without all of them. Thank you very much. iii ABTRACT The research mainly focuses on describing syntactical characteristics and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese novels, after that pointing out the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of them. Descriptive method, comparative analysis method, and analytical and synthetic methods were applied in the research to expose and analyze the data. This research analyzes two literary works, an English novel “If tomorrow comes” by Sidney Sheldon and a Chinese novel “古船” (The Ancient Ship) by Zhang Wei. As the result, 36 adverbs of degree with 686 occurrences were found in the English novel and 26 adverbs of degree with 1.286 occurrences were found in the Chinese one. The results of this research are: Firstly, both adverbs of degree in English and adverbs of degree in Chinese can take various positions in the sentences like, post verbal position, preverbal position... Secondly, English adverbs of degree and Chinese adverbs of degree as well can modify different word class such as: adjective phrases, adverb phrases, prepositional phrases and verbal phrases, and noun phrase. Last, English and Chinese adverbs of degree are divided into some semantic categories. On the whole, adverbs of degree in English and Chinese share some similarities, but they are different in some ways, too. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Adj : Adjective Adv : Adverb Adv-Ps : Adverb Phrase APs : Adjective Phrase AV : Auxiliary Verb N : Noun NPs : Noun Phrase PPs : Preposition Phrase S : Subject V VPs : Verb : Verb Phrase v LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 4.1. English adverbs of degree found in the English novel and Table 4.2. their occurrence ……………………………………………31 English adverbs of degree found in the English novel and their occurrence ……………………………………………37 Table 4.3. Syntactic features of English adverbs degree in the novel “If tomorrow come” by Sidney Sheldon……………………... 41 Table 4.4. Syntactic features of Chinese adverbs degree in the novel “古 船” (The ancient ship) by Zhang Wei……………………...42 Table 4.5. Semantic features of English adverbs degree in the novel “If tomorrow come” by Sidney Sheldon……………………... 49 Table 4.6. Semantic features of Chinese adverbs degree in the novel “古 船” (The ancient ship) by Zhang Wei……………………...54 Table 4.7. Table 4.8. Syntactic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese novels……………………………………………..55 Semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese novels …………………………………………….57 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate of originality i Acknowledgements ii iii iv Abstract List of abbreviations List of tables and figures v vi Table of contents 1 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1 1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 1.3. Research questions 1.4. Methods of the study 3 3 3 1.5. Scope of the study 1.6. Significance of the study 1.7. Structure of the study 4 4 5 6 6 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1. Review of previous studies 2.1.1. Previous studies in English 6 2.1.2. Previous studies in Chinese 6 2.2. Review of theoretical background 8 2.2.1. Adverb in English and Chinese 8 2.2.1.1. Adverb in English 8 2.2.1.2. Adverbs in Chinese 11 2.2.2. Adverbs of degree in English and adverbs of degree in 15 Chinese 2.2.2.1. Adverbs of degree in English 15 2.2.2.2. Adverbs of degree in Chinese 2.3. Summary Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 3.1. Research questions 3.2. Research setting 3.3. Research approach vii 21 25 26 26 26 27 3.4. Research methods 3.5. Principles for data collection and data analysis 3.6. Summary 28 29 30 Chapter 4: ADVERBS OF DEGREE IN ENGLISH AND IN CHINESE 31 4.1. Syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English in 31 the novel “If tomorrow comes” by Sidney Sheldon 4.1.1. Syntactic features of adverbs of degree in English 4.1.1.1. Positions 4.1.1.2. Functions 31 31 34 4.1.2. Semantic features of adverbs of degree in English 4.1.2.1. Emphasizer 4.1.2.2. Amplifiers 4.1.2.3. Down-toners 38 38 38 40 4.2. Syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in Chinese in 42 the novel “The ancient ship” by Zhang Wei 4.2.1. Syntactic features of adverbs of degree in Chinese 43 4.2.1.1. Positions 4.2.1.2. Functions 4.2.2. Semantic features of adverbs of degree in Chinese 4.2.2.1. Absolute adverbs 4.2.2.2. Relative adverbs 4.3. Comparison between syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and those in Chinese 4.3.1. In terms of syntactic features 4.3.2. In terms of semantic features 4.4. Summary 43 45 50 50 51 55 Chapter 5: CONCLUSION 5.1. Recapitulation 55 57 60 61 61 5.2. Concluding remarks 5.3. Implication of the thesis for learning English and Chinese 5.4. Limitation of the research 5.5. Recommendations and suggestion for further studies REFERENCES 61 62 64 64 66 APPRENDIX 69 viii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale English is an international language, spoken in many countries both as a native and as a second or foreign language. It is taught in the schools in almost every country on this earth. English language is an international language used all over the world as a means of communication. Chinese is not used as widely as English, but it is spoken by the most people. It cannot be denied that English and Chinese are currently the two most popular foreign languages in Vietnam, and it has been a tendency for Vietnamese to learn the two languages at the same time. Any comparative and contrastive studies about English and Chinese are supposed to be crucial for Vietnamese learners and to some extend can add certain theoretical background to study English and Chinese. In language study, it has been widely agreed that words are one of the most important components which language learners must master in order to comprehend not only their denotative meaning but also connotative meaning including other necessary aspects such as their patterning and grammar in use. Two main types of words that play important roles in languages in general and in English and Chinese in particular are content words and function words. Linguistically, it is explained that a function word, sometimes called a grammatical word or a closed class word, is a word that contains little lexical meaning or has no meaningful meaning, but expresses a grammatical or structural relationship with other words in a sentence (Hartmann & Stork, 1972; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985; Au-Yeung, Howell & Pilgrim, 1998; Hartsuiker, Bastiaanse, Postma & Wijnen, 2005). Function words include prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, modals, particles and quantifiers. In contrast to the function word, a content word or a lexical word or an open-class word, is referred to as a word that has meaning itself and function to carry the content of a sentence. According to Carter, McCarthy and O’Keeffe (2011), English has four classes of content words, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Since ancient times, the words of the Chinese language have been grouped into two main categories: 虚 词 (function word) and 实 词 1 (content word). The parts of speech classified as content words are: nouns, pronouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs, adjectives, adverbs, number words, measure words and interjections. Chen (1978) takes adverbs as content words that show manner, degree or tone of the statements. The discussion of adverbs has been an everlasting topic in linguistics. From ancient Greek grammar, dating back to the 2nd century BC, to the present, the discussions of adverbs have been popular among all linguistic schools. Even so, there are still contradictions and disputes, for example, the adverb forms that are hard to seize, meanings that are not easy to operate on. Adverbs in general and adverbs of degree in particular are extremely difficult language phenomena Thus, the access to knowledge about adverbs of degree is considered important to language learners, since without good achievement of adverbs, one will find difficulties in using the language effectively. Yet, Philip (2008) finds out that the use of adverbs of degree is still problematic for language learners In the process of teaching English and Chinese adverbs in general and adverbs of degree in particular, there is a fact that Vietnamese learners have faced many problems when they use this group of words. They are often confused to choose the right adverb, especially adverbs of degree and make errors in using them. Therefore, a study has been carried out to find out how to use adverbs of degree in English and Chinese accurately and correctly from the analysis of their syntactic and semantic features. As there are a lot of adverbs of degree with different syntactic and semantic features in both English and Chinese, so a great number of learners make mistakes when they use this adverb group in different situations to communicate. To identify and compare the syntactic and semantic features of the English and Chinese adverbs of degree is important to learners, so that they can have good knowledge to use this word group effectively. For the above reasons, the topic “Syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese” is chosen with the purpose of finding out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese adverbs of degree. The study only focuses on the adverbs of degree in the English novel “If tomorrow comes” by Sidney 2 Sheldon and in Chinese novel “The ancient ship” by Zhang Wei with the hope that thesis will be a useful reference, to the extent possible, for teaching and learning English as well as Chinese. 1.2. Aims and objectives 1.2.1. Aims of the study: To help learners of Vietnamese master English and Chinese adverbs of degree in terms of their syntactic and semantic features in the process of learning English and Chinese correctly and effectively 1.2.2. Objectives of the study: To identify the syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese. To find out the similarities and differences between adverbs of degree in English and those in Chinese in terms of their syntactic and semantic features. 1.3. Research questions This study intends to answer the following questions: (1). What are the syntactic and semantic features of English and Chinese adverbs of degree? (2). What are the similarities and differences between adverbs of degree in English and those in Chinese in terms of their syntactic and semantic features? 1.4. Scope of the study Academically, adverbs of degree which are analyzed in this study are English and Chinese in terms of syntactic and semantic features. The data used in the study are collected from two modern novels: the one in English is “If tomorrow comes” by Sydney Sheldon and the one in Chinese is “The ancient ship” by Zhang Wei. 3 For English adverbs of degree, from the novel “If tomorrow comes”, 36 of adverbs of degree were found with 686 occurrences. Regarding for Chinese adverbs of degree, 26 adverbs of degree were found from the novel “古船” (The ancient ship) with about 1.286 occurrences. 1.5. Methods of the study Qualitative method is first used for describing and interpreting the syntactic and semantic features of English and Chinese adverbs of degree. The main methods employed in this study are comparative and contrastive methods, exploring the similarities and differences between English and Chinese adverbs of degree. Analytical and synthetic methods are also used for grouping English and Chinese adverbs of degree on the basic of certain criteria according to structural and semantic features. 1.6. Significance of the study Theoretically, the similarities and differences between the English and Chinese adverbs of degree in terms of syntactic and semantic features will be highlighted and analyzed in great detail to add some certain theoretical background to study English and Chinese Practically, this research helps, first, the Vietnamese learners have better knowledge about the syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese. Second, the Vietnamese academic writers as well as language users will be able to promote their accuracy in using the English and Chinese adverbs of degree. 1.7. Structure of Thesis The thesis consists of 5 chapters as follow: Chapter 1 is the Introduction of the study which shows the reasons why the topic is chosen, what the research aims at as well as the scope, the methods, the significance and the structural organization of the study 4 Chapter 2 is the Literature review and Theoretical background of the study. This chapter will give the brief review of related literature and theoretical background of every matter mentioned in the study. Chapter 3 is the Methodology in which the main steps and techniques applied in the study such as data collection, description and comparison the adverbs of degree between two languages is provided. Chapter 4 is the syntactic and semantic features of adverbs of degree in English and Chinese novels. It presents and analyzes the collected data from the English and Chinese novels as well as gives the similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic features of English adverbs of degree and Chinese adverbs of degree. Besides that, the study offers some comprehensive understanding about English and Chinese adverbs of degree for Vietnamese learners of English and Chinese. Chapter 5 is the Conclusion of the study which presents the recapitulation of the study, the limitations of the study and some suggestions for further study. 5 CHAPTER II. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1. Review of previous studies 2.1.1. Previous studies in English Gusti Agung Wulandari (2013) in her thesis with the title “Adverb of degree analysis in “Real Life Reads” pages of cosmopolitan magazine” has analyzed form, function and position of adverbs of degree in cosmopolitan magazine in English. Source of data uses in her thesis is article with title “real life” cosmopolitan magazine. The purpose of her thesis is to identify the forms of adverbs of degree, to analyze the function of adverbs of degree and then to describe the positions of adverbs of degree. Conclusion in her thesis is that most of adverbs of degree are formed by adding-ly suffix from adjective or they have the suffixation process. Based on their function, adverbs of degree in the sentences are used to modify adjective. The second thesis with the title “Adverb of degree in the Short Story “the Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving” (2019) was made by Atika Rahmadiana. This research analyzes one of works, the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. The purpose of the research is to identify the forms of adverbs of degree in sentences, to describe the positions of adverbs of degree in sentences, and to analyze the functions of adverbs of degree in sentences that occur in short story “the Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. Kennedy and McNally (2002, 2005) discuss the asymmetric distributions of the co-occurrence between adverbs of degree and adjectives. On the basis of analyzing the relation between adverbs of degree and gradable adjectives, they provide some crucial findings that the standard of comparison for gradable adjectives is contextually-driven. 2.1.2. Previous studies in Chinese According to Lü (1980), Chinese adverbs of degree may modify some cooccurring categories and render degree property to them. When modifying their following element, Chinese adverbs of degree are either used for specifying strongdegree attribution, or utilized for assigning minimal-degree attribution with 6 pejorative evaluation. In his finding, some possible categories following adverbs of degree, such as adjectives, psych-verbs, auxiliaries, demonstratives and pronouns, are listed individually in the dictionary. As for Zhu (1956, 1982), he focuses the study on the relation between adverbs of degree and two categories (adjectives and psych-verbs). The adverb of degree, hen is used to distinguish the murky boundaries between adjective and verb. In addition, some characteristics of hen are described: (A) Hen may mark degree and modify major gradable adjectives and minor verbs. (B) It cannot modify reduplicated adjectives which intrinsically encode a certain amount of quantity, and cannot collocate with non-gradable adjectives that logically attribute the property of trueness. The two studies mentioned above provide a basic description of the collocations with adverbs of degree and they stimulate continuous discussion of the diverting behaviors between adverbs of degree. Nevertheless, it is insufficient to provide a plausible account of the observed phenomena. They mostly draw attention on a pre-theoretical overview of the collocations in lexicon intuitively without explicit examples. Zhuang (2002) makes an effort to describe the characteristics of the adverbs of degree such as quality distinction, quality gradation, and synonymy/ antonymy, juxtaposition of meaning of adverbs of degree, the findings mostly focus on discussing the relation between adjectives, psych-verbs or degree adverbs. As for the collocations between adverbs of degree and post-adverbial categories such as nouns (common noun and proper noun), demonstrative and interrogative, this work does not tackle these phenomena. Overall, all most aspects of English and Chinese adverbs of degree are analyzed and discussed in the researches above such as forms, functions, positions, collocations. However, there has been no comparative and contrastive study on English and Chinese adverbs of degree in terms of both syntactic and semantic features. That is the reason for this research to be done. 7 2.2. Review of theoretical background 2.2.1. Adverb in English and Chinese 2.2.1.1. Adverb in English a. The definition of adverb An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a noun or noun phrase, determiner, a numeral, a pronoun or a preposition phrase and can sometimes be used as a complement of a preposition. An adverb is a part of speech that describes or modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, clause, or sentence. An adverb is the sentence element used to qualify or determine verbs. In addition, an adverb is also used to qualify or determine nouns, adjectives, other adverbs, and even entire sentence. Raymond Murphy (1985: 192) states that an adverb tells us about a verb. An adverb tells us in what way someone does something or in what way something happens. An adverb is a word of group words which has function to explain a verb, adjective of adverbs which also has a function in a sentence (Gorys Keraf, 1984: 74). An adverb is a word that adds more information about place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc to a verb, an adjective, a phrase or another adverb (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 1995: 18). Based on Wikipedia, http://www.wikipedia.com/definition/adverbs that adverbs are descriptive words that convey a sense of how, when, where, or why. An adverb's descriptiveness can be applied to a verb, an adjective, or to another adverb. An Adverb can be concluded that it can be simply viewed as the process of the reader’s thinking in relation to written. b. The kinds of adverb P.C Wren and H. Martin (1935) state that adverbs may be divided into the following classes, according to their meanings. A. Adverbs of manner: Adverbs of manner say how something happens. They are happily, quickly, terribly, beautifully, badly, well, fast, etc Examples: (1) The dog runs quickly. 8 (2) Sasha sang beautifully. B. Adverbs of time: Adverbs of time say when something happens. Among others are today, afterward, in June, last year, daily, weekly, before, soon, still, last. Examples: (3) 1 am going to London today. (4) She has a new hair style every week. C. Adverbs of degree or quantity: Adverbs of degree modify an adjective or another adverb. They are placed before the adjective or adverb. Those adverbs of degree or quantity are for instance absolutely, almost, barely, completely, enough, only, quite, so, too, very, just, much, etc. Examples: (5) Mr. John explained the topic so clear. (6) You are absolutely right. D. Adverbs of frequency: Adverbs of frequency show how often something happens. The adverbs of frequency are always, often, usually sometimes, never, etc. Examples: (7) The students never come late. (8) She often writes a letter. E. Adverbs of place: Adverbs of place show where something happens. They are around, upstairs, here, to bed, in London, out of the window, etc. Examples: (9) The children are playing upstairs. (10) Come and sit here! F. Adverbs of affirmation and negation Examples: (11) Surely, you are mistaken. (12) I do not know him. G. Adverbs of reason Example: (13) He is hence unable to refute the charge. Marcella Frank (1972) says there are many kinds of adverbs. (1) Types of adverbs classified by meaning A. Manner B. Place and direction C. Time D. Degree or quantifier 9 (2) Types of adverbs classified by function A. Sentence adverbs: These adverbs modify an entire sentence. Example: (14). Fortunately, the boy threw the ball quickly. B. Conjunctive adverbs: They probably should be considered as modifying the whole sentence or clauses rather than the verb alone. These adverbs show such a relationship as result (therefore, accordingly), addition (besides, moreover), contrast (however, nevertheless), condition (otherwise), time (then). Examples: (15). Put one box beside the other; please! (16). I would like to go; however, I have not time. C. Explanatory adverbs: These adverbs illustrate or enumerate: namely, for example, as, i.e. (that, is), e.g. (for example). Examples: (17). He worked as he talked. (18). I bought many things namely book, bag and pen. D. Relative, interrogative adverbs E. Exclamatory' adverbs (how) These adverbs are used with adjectives and adverbs. Examples: (19). How beautiful she is! (20). How beautifully she dresses! c. The functions of adverb Marcella Frank (1972) states that there are three functions of adverbs. They are as follows: A. The modifier of a verb. Examples: (21). The boy threw the ball quickly. (22). They speak English fluently. B. The modifier of an adjective and adverb Examples: (23). 1 work quite hard every day. (24). He was clearly disappointed when he failed. C. The modifier of an entire sentence. Examples: (25). Fortunately, the boy threw the ball quickly. 10 (26). Yesterday, we submitted the report to the committee. d. The positions of adverb There are three positions of adverbs: A. Initial position before the subject. Example: (27). Sometimes, she comes late. B. Mid-position with the verb. Example: (28). She sometimes come late. C. Final position after the verb plus an object or another complement. Example: (29). She come late sometimes. 2.2.1.2. Adverbs in Chinese a. The definition of adverb The definition of Chinese adverbs varies from person to person. Chen (1982) says that adverbs are modifiers of adjectives or verbs. Chen (1978) takes adverbs as content words that show manner, degree or tone of the statements. Ding (1982) agrees to some extent with Cheng Ze Chen by saying that adverbs are modifiers of verbs, auxiliary verbs and adjectives. Wang (1943) defines them as words that will never be the core elements of sentences, i.e. subjects or predicates. Zhu (1982) argues that adverbs are function words only used as adverbials. The above definitions have different foundations. Some are based on the lexical meaning, and others are based on the grammatical function or both. In the book of Modern Chinese, Huang and Liao (1991) have integrated the previous definitions and defined adverbs as modifiers of verbs and adjectives in the sense of degree, scope, time, frequency, etc. Adverbs in Chinese, with only two exceptions: 很 (very) and 极 (extremely), always precede the modified words. It is proper to say that adverbs are usually used to modify verbs and adjectives. However, as found in the corpus and also proved in some research articles, Chinese adverbs sometimes modify nouns as well b. The kinds of adverb A. Conjunctive adverb 11