A contrastive study on the Speech-act Adverbs in Spanish and its parallels in Chinese: An Event Semantics perspective

Abstract

The present study, based on the semantics of events, delves into the difference of the linguistic resources used in Spanish and Chinese to express the conceptual semantics of events of speech acts oriented towards transmitter or receiver, and observes the diachronic evolution of adverbs of Spanish-speaking acts and their parallels in Chinese, in order to discover the motivation of the interlinguistic difference of the two languages in contrast. The diachronic development of adverbs of speech acts in Spanish and their parallels in Chinese shows a similar pattern of evolution, but the two expressions in the two languages, in contrast, are in different stages of lexicalization. The reason for the difference in the degree of lexicalization could be that the two languages are morphologically different. Spanish, rich in morphological aspects, is more capable of combining several semantics of events through lexical resources; Adverbs are responsible for the projection of events of speech acts to the surface structure, because other conceptual semantic constituents do not necessarily need to be presented, and especially, the semantic entity of the verbs enunciated can be encoded implicitly. While Chinese, as it is a language that lacks morphological aspects and therefore it has to resort to syntactic resources to encode the same concept of event, the semantic constituents and, above all, the enunciated verbs have to be explicitly projected in the surface structure. Our work also highlights the feasibility and effectiveness of the conceptual structure shared by the two contrasting languages, which serves as tertium comparationis in inter-linguistic study and opens a new perspective of contrastive analysis between the two typologically different languages such as the Spanish and Chinese.