The semantic features of “changchang”, “jingchang”, “wangwang” and “tongchang”—A Corpus-Based perspective

Abstract

In addition to indicate frequency, “changchang” ([changchang] (often,always;frequently,usually)) and “jingchang” ([jingchang](often,always; frequently,usually)) can also be used to represent that actions or events occur, or states exist with regularity, and the sentence express people’s experience summary as well as “wang wang” ([wangwang](frequently,usually;often,always)) and “tongchang” ([tongchang](frequently,usually;often,always)). This study points out: (1) The four adverbs tend to match the controllable/uncontrollable verbs when they refer to frequency/regular; (2) They are more inclined to mean regular when they match adjectives. This study applies the method of corpus linguistics, combines with the comparison methods of function words to verify with syntactic behavior. Based on the observation of a large number of data and analyze the specific facts, we get a sequence of semantic features.