Abstract
Based on large-scale corpora, this study examines the stylistic characteristics of the low-degree adverb “shaowei” (稍微‘slightly’) from three aspects: stylistic distribution, colligation and semantic prosody. It has been found that: 1. The proportion of “shaowei” in spoken Chinese is higher than that in written Chinese, but the distribution of “shaowei” in different sub-genres varies considerably. 2. The proportion of colligation of “shaowei + verb phrase” is higher than that of “shaowei + adjective phrase”. In terms of sub-genres, “shaowei” inclines to modify verbs in Translation Works and tends to modify adjectives in CCTV News. 3. “Shaowei” has a positive semantic prosody in both written and spoken Chinese, but it is quite different from the dictionary which says “shaowei” can only collocate with commendatory words. To be specific, “shaowei” shows a neutral semantic prosody in Practical Writing and Learned and a negative one in CCTV News.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Humanity and Social Science Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (21G079, A Research on Modern Chinese Event Nouns for International Chinese Education).
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Wu, Z. (2023). A Quantitative Study on the Low-Degree Adverb “Shaowei” – A Stylistic Perspective. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_9
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