The Restrictiveness and Subjectivity of Jin3Jin3

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This study probes the restrictiveness and subjectivity of Jin3Jin3 by analyzing its syntactic structures and semantic functions using corpus data. The research material was collected from “Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese”. There were a total of 171 instances analyzed, but two ones were removed; thus, this paper counted percentage by 169. The results of the study are as follows: First and the most frequent one, an abstract or real space was restricted (44%): the speaker stressed how narrow the space was for a certain purpose. Second, the scope on instruments was 20%, the speaker emphasized the use of a method and evaluated its effectiveness. Third, the restriction on number was about 14% where the speaker believed a certain number was highly relevant to a negative or positive result. Fourth, there were 12% on the cause or result in a sentence. The speaker emphasized the cause, which could have a positive or negative influence, when it is restricted. When a result was restricted, it was always negative; thus, the speaker hoped it would not happen. Finally, the scope of time constituted about 10% of the total instances. The speaker often described a negative event that happened in a short period of time. The finding proved that there is a strong connection between a speaker’s evaluation and the components restricted by Jin3Jin3. It is expected that this paper should provide empirical evidence to conduct further research on the restrictiveness and subjectivity of Chinese scope-adverbs.