The meaning-shift unit of chinese intensifiers: A corpus-based study

Abstract

Meaning-Shift unit put forward by John Sinclair is the latest theory of meaning in corpus linguistics in the early 21st century. In this paper, it aims to analyze the meaning units of wanquan, in an attempt to shed light on whether Meaning-Shift unit is valid to account for the behavior of such a Chinese intensifier. The result illustrates that Meaning-Shift unit is influenced by the categories of co-selection, in which semantic prosody plays a decisive role, and that wanquan has four types of Meaning-Shift units, each of which has a canonical form and several possible variants.