副詞“就”、“才”再探討

Abstract

In the paper the main characteristics of adverbs ‘Jiu(就)’ and ‘Cai(才)’ are examined, the usages of ‘Jiu(就)’ and ‘Cai(才)’ have been distinguished as follows: the former of which include seven emphatic usages and four non-emphatic usages, and the latter of which include five emphatic usages and four non-emphatic usages. The emphatic usages of the two words have the characteristic which does not change the truth value of a sentence, but conveys some conventional implicatures or plays a role of the trigger for pragmatic inference to induce pragmatic implicatures. The non-emphatic usages of the two words can be divided into two different kinds: (1) If ‘Jiu(就)’ or ‘Cai(才)’ is cancelled from a sentence, it does not affect the grammatical legitimacy of it, but will cause some changes in the meaning of the sentence. (2) If ‘Jiu(就)’ or ‘Cai(才)’ is cancelled from a sentence, the sentence will be not natural, even become ungrammatical. The research in this paper proves that the meanings and the usages of ‘Jiu(就)’ and ‘Cai(才)’ are very different from the explanations of traditional dictionaries. These two words not only convey the conventional implicatures or act as a trigger for pragmatic inference to induce pragmatic implicatures with a high frequency, but also can be used in several different ways when they convey or induce different implicatures. On the one hand, these phenomena indicate that ‘Jiu(就)’ and ‘Cai(才)’ are often used for pragmatic purpose, on the other hand, they indicate that the complexity of meaning structure and the usage of the two words is beyond the previous understanding of academia.