汉语口语中的副词后置现象及生成动因探讨

The Postposition of Adverbs in Spoken Chinese and Motivations for its Generation

In modern spoken Chinese, we can often hear adverb postposition sentences. In this paper, we analyzed the causes and mechanisms of adverb postpositions by examining their pattern of usage . The phenomenon of adverb postposition in spoken Chinese follows a certain discourse mechanism based on several cognitive internal motivations. First, the relative urgency of speaking in oral dialogue allows the speaker to express more important information first and give less important information afterwards. This phenomenon often occurs in topic-comment sentences where the adverbs stay close to predicate focus. The postposition makes the focus more prominent. In argument-focus sentences, as the adverbs are semantically more closely related to subject arguments, they need to stay close to subject arguments and cannot be postdated. And when the speaker tells a new event to the listener, the adverbs in the sentence are generally in the periphery of the whole propositional information, it is not close to the subject or the predicate, so the postposition does not affect the conveyance of the meaning of the sentence. However, the subclass semantics of the adverbs still distinguish functional words and content words. Therefore, they are restricted by information structure in different ways. When the adverb acts as a focus or a part of focus areas, it cannot be left behind. When the adverb's meaning is functional and does not bear the propositional information of the sentence but only the modal information, it can easily stay out of the proposition and postposition.

在现代汉语口语中，我们经常可以听到副词后置的句子。本文通过整理副词的后置现象，分析了副词后置的成因和机制。通过上述分析我们发现，汉语口语中的副词后置现象并非无章可循，而是遵循一定的话语机制，具有认知上的内在动因。首先，口语对话中由于说话时间的相对紧迫，说话者容易将更为重要的信息先表达出来，再在其基础上进行补充。这种现象多发生在话题句中,话题句中副词靠近谓语焦点，后置后更加突出谓语焦点。而使用有标记性的论元焦点句时，由于副词与主语论元关系更为紧密，因此需要靠近主语论元而不能后置。最后，当说话者将一个新的事件传达给听话者时，由于句中副词一般是处在整个命题信息的外围，无所谓靠近主语还是谓语，因此后置也不影响句义的传达。但是，副词内部次类语义仍有虚实之分，因此受到信息结构的制约不同。当副词充当焦点或属于焦点域的一部分时，不能后置；当副词语义较虚，不承担句子的命题信息，而只承担情态信息时，容易脱离命题进行后置。