Covarying Adverbs in Post-Modal Position: A Collostructional Approach

This paper employs Covarying collexeme analysis and Correspondence analysis to explore the attractiveness and correspondence between two-character Chinese modals and adverbs in the pattern of [Modal + Adverb.] A corpus of 2.95 billion Chinese characters was built to explore the collocational patterns. The results indicate that the attractions of adverbs may influence the modification boundary of the modal, and further reveal that the types of attracted adverbial collexemes largely correspond to modality types. Specifically, deontic modals yingdang and bixu tend to attract evaluative adverbs, which can convey requirements or expectations. Dynamic modals keyi and nenggou are inclined to attract descriptive adverbs that modify VP, typically indicating abilities or effort. Epistemic modals keneng, biran, yiding prefer adverbs indicating scopes, time, and negation. Notably, yinggai shows distinct behavior as it is inclined to attract question words and degree markers. The results also indicate that the combinational relationships of [Modal + Adverb] are correlated with modality types and underscore the importance of incorporating such patterns into the constructional modeling of modal semantics. © 2023 IEEE