The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

438 / 2020-02-29 02:27:01

A Comparative Study between “This/That” as Intensifiers in American English and “Zhe me(这、这么)/Na me(那、那么)” in Mandarin

American English; Mandarin; Grammaticalization; Intensifiers; This/That; Zhe (me)/Na (me)

Contrastive Linguistics > Contrastive Linguistics

The intensifiers “this/that” can be traced back to the fourteenth century, when these deictic demonstratives acquired an adverbial status as a result of a grammaticalization process by means of which they became degree adverbs with the meaning of ‘to this/that extent, so much, so’ (OED s.v. this/that adv.). “zhe me(这、这么)/na me(那、那么)” can be the corresponding words in Mandarin, which however embrace a longer and more complicated grammaticalization process than “this/that”.

The present paper first contributes to the study of the development of intensifiers through the grammaticalization of deictic demonstratives analyzing the use and distribution of these intensifiers with the following objectives: (a) to trace their origin and grammaticalization as degree words in English and Mandarin; (b) to analyze their development over time; (c) to assess their distribution across register/ text types; and (d) to cast light on the lexico-semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms of their mode of construal. Second, it makes a comparative investigation between “this/that” in American English and “zhe me(这、这么)/na me(那、那么)” in Mandarin with respect to the mentioned aspects respectively .

The evidence comes from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English; Pre-modern Chinese Language Corpus, the Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistic at Peking University and Modern Chinese Corpus of National Language Commission (国家语委现代汉语语料库).