A Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Modern Chinese Adverbs “Zhen”, “Zhenshi” And “Zhende”

This research used the Modern Chinese Research Corpus System constructed by Beijing Language and Culture University as the corpus source, and analyzed the pragmatic functions of Modern Chinese adverbs “zhen”, “zhenshi” and “zhende” which are located before the predicate and are used as sentence adverbial. The results show that these adverbs have similarities and differences in pragmatic functions. The adverb “zhen” has four pragmatic functions: one is to confirm authenticity, the other is to express subjective evaluation, the third is to express a high degree of authenticity, and the fourth is to make hypotheses. The adverb “zhenshi” has only one pragmatic function, that is, the subjective evaluation function. The adverb “zhende” has two pragmatic functions: one is to confirm authenticity, and the other is to express subjective evaluation. The adverb “zhenshi” and “zhende” can appear together with the degree adverbs “tai” and “hen”, but the adverb “zhen” cannot appear with the degree adverbs. The adverb “zhen” and the adverb “zhende” can be replaced with each other, and the meaning of the sentence remains unchanged after the replacement.

On the Rise and Diffusion of New Intensifiers: This and That in Some Asian Varieties of English

The intensifiers this and that acquired their intensifying function as a result of a grammaticalization process by means of which deictic demonstratives became degree adverbs with the meaning “to this or that extent, so much, so.” The phenomenon spread in the early nineteenth century as a typical resource of spoken English, and since then these intensifiers have found a niche in the written domain by imposing a scalar construal on adjectives for which scale is not the default. Even though these intensifiers are observed in practically all the varieties of English around the world, they predominate in American English, with its use in all the other inner circle varieties lagging well behind. In the outer circle varieties, the construction is also subject to some geographical preferences. The present article has two objectives: to evaluate the role and distribution of this and that as intensifiers in selected Asian varieties of English and to analyze the lexicosemantic structure of their right-hand collocates in terms of word class and mode of construal. The study demonstrates, firstly, the existence of different stages of grammaticalization of this and that, the latter having a wider repertoire of collocates; and secondly, an ongoing process of colloquialization and Americanization of the phenomenon, which is contributing to its growing diffusion in the outer circle varieties of English. The evidence comes from the Indian, Hong Kong, Singaporean and Philippines components of the Corpus of Global Web-based English.

A multi-modal and multi-scale emotion-enhanced inference model based on fuzzy recognition

Only the label corresponding to the maximum value of the fully connected layer is used as the output category when a neural network performs classification tasks. When the maximum value of the fully connected layer is close to the sub-maximum value, the classification obtained by considering only the maximum value and ignoring the sub-maximum value is not completely accurate. To reduce the noise and improve classification accuracy, combining the principles of fuzzy reasoning, this paper integrates all the output results of the fully connected layer with the emotional tendency of the text based on the dictionary to establish a multi-modal fuzzy recognition emotion enhancement model. The provided model considers the enhancement effect of negative words, degree adverbs, exclamation marks, and question marks based on the smallest subtree on the emotion of emotional words, and defines the global emotional membership function of emojis based on the corpus. Through comparing the results of CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM and GRU on Weibo and Douyin, it is shown that the provided model can effectively improve the text emotion recognition when the neural network output result is not clear, especially for long texts.

LINGUISTIC DEVICES OF EVASION STRATEGIES (BASED ON RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH SOURCES)

В статье предпринята попытка на материале художественной литературы конкретизировать и сопоставить совокупность русскоязычных и англоязычных лингвистических средств и приемов намека, уклонения, дистанцирования, направленных на достижение коммуникативных намерений говорящего. В работе применен прагматический подход к анализу техник маневрирования. Теория стратегий речевого поведения в англоязычной среде Ю. Б. Кузьменковой служит основой нашего исследования. Оно выполнено на материале, отобранном из литературно-художественных источников. В работе использованы описательный метод, сравнительно-сопоставительный анализ, метод сплошной выборки. Исследование позволило выявить сходство и различие языковых средств и прагматических установок, на речевом уровне отражающих особенности стратегий поведения представителей англоязычной и русскоязычной культур в неформальных коммуникативных ситуациях. Исследование показало, что в обоих языках дополнительному смягчению побуждающих речевых актов содействует яркая эпистемическая модальность, заключенная в форме модальных глаголов, наречий меры и степени, вопросительных предложений, вводно-модальных слов, глаголов в сослагательном наклонении. Кроме перечисленных языковых средств, в русском языке различная степень модальной градации и высокая степень вежливости и неопределенности передается с помощью частиц (не, ли, бы), специфичных эмоционально-экспрессивных языковых средств и приемов. В отличие от русского языка, способы оформления англоязычных побуждающих речевых актов свидетельствуют о регулярном расхождении между семантическим значением и прагматической установкой. The article makes an attempt to specify and compare the complex of Russian and English linguistic devices of understatement, softening, distancing aimed at achieving communicative purposes of the speaker as exemplified in fiction works. Pragmatic approach to the analysis of evasion techniques is applied in the study. The theory of speech behavior strategies in the English environment by Yu. Kuzmenkova serves the basis for the current study. The study is based on the material taken from literary works. It employed the methods of description, comparative analysis, continuous sampling. The work enables to identify some similarities and differences of linguistic devices and pragmatic purposes at the speech level reflecting strategies of behavior of the English and Russian cultures’ representatives in informal communication. The study suggests that in both languages epistemic modality presented by modal verbs, degree adverbs, interrogative sentences, introductory phrases, verbs in the subjunctive mood contribute to additional mitigation of incentive speech acts. Besides the listed linguistic devices, specific particles and emotionally expressive means and techniques are used to convey different degrees of modality, politeness, indirectness in the Russian language. As opposed to Russian, the techniques of building English incentive speech acts are indicative of regular discrepancy between semantic meaning and pragmatic purpose.

Synthetic Intensification Devices in Old English

Even though degree adverbs (e.g., swiþe) represent the most common intensification strategy in Old English, morphological devices are also very frequent, as expected in a predominantly synthetic language. This article studies synthetic intensification strategies in Old English with a focus on degree modification of adjectives and adverbs by means of spatial formatives (e.g., þurh- in þurhbitter ‘very bitter’ and for- in foreaþe ‘very easily’), paying attention both to the features of the intensifying formative and to the characteristics of the intensified base. Using the cognitive construct of the “Image Schema,” I show that the original spatial meaning of the formatives can help explain their combinatorial preferences in terms of boundedness. Of all the items studied, for- stands out as the most grammaticalized Old English spatial intensifying formative: it is semantically opaque, is very productive with both adjectives and adverbs, and has a very wide collocational profile.