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【Abstract】“So” and “such” are two high frequency adverbsin English, esp. in spoken English.This study finds that these two adverbs are less often usedin news corpus in the respective of quantity. It also shows that "so"always combine with "that"and used as conjunctives in news language. Most of the time it is used as the adverb of degree. "such"has a lower frequency than "so"does in news corpus. The distinctive features of these two words in news are also discussed.
【Key Words】so; such; frequency;news
【中图分类号】G642【文献标识码】A【文章编号】1005-1074(2009)05-0117-01
1Introduction
1.1Definition of Adverb According to the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, adverb is a word that describes or adds to the meaning of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a sentence, and which answers such questions ashow?'Where?' orwhen?'One type of adverb is characterized by the morphological feature" ly"For example: happily, quickly, etc.Obviously, these items have a regular correspondence to certain adjectives and said to derive from the corresponding adjective forms. Another type of adverbs includes now, then, later, earlier and yet another, here, there, everywhere.
1.2The functions of adverbsThere are several types of adverbs in terms of function. Adverbs of manner, (quickly), adverbs of time (now), and adverbs of place (here). Items like seldom, never, often, frequently, always, invariably are sometimes described as adverbs of frequency; Upwards, downwards, sideways, left, right, forwards, backwards and so on are often called directional adverbs. Another set includes such items as however, moreover, nevertheless, thus, consequently, finally, and closely related to this group; Frankly, honestly, clearly, apparently, both these types often occur at the beginning of a clause and they are sometimes called sentence adverbs.Halliday suggests that one of the primary functions of adverbs is as the head word of a group functioning as adjunct at the rank of clause.Adjuncts,as their name suggests, are slightly peripheral in a way that the others are not. It is an element that has not got the potential of being subject. It is typically realized by an adverbial group or a prepositional phrase.It is part of the basic structure of the clause or sentence in which it occurs, and modifies the verb. Adverbs of time, place, frequency, degree, and manner, are examples of adjunct. For example：①He die in England；②I have almost finish.Adjuncts fall into three subtypes: model, circumstantial and conjunctive. Corresponding more or less to the three metafunctions: ideational, textual and interpersonal.
2Material used and research methodology
Corpus-based analysis is empirical analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts. It utilizes a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as "corpus", as the basis for analysis, it makes extensive use of computers for analysis, using both automatic and interactive techniques. Also, it depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques, so corpus-driven analysis is a kind of analysis with high reliability and validity and in nowadays' linguistic research field, it is commonly and widely be used. It should be seen as a complementary approach to more traditional approaches.
Since corpus is involved, in this paper the News corpus with about 110000 words, selected from CNN, is adopted. It is well known that CNN (cable news networks) is the most famous cable news network all over the world. CNN is founded in 1980; at that time it had only 1700000 users, while nowadays the number has increased to 80000000. CNN is famous for its continuous most rapid and authoritative report on the international information during 24 hours. In addition CNN is regarded as one of the most popular, reliable sources of news and information throughout the world. CNN can provide the live report for audience and analyze the unexpected incidents. Besides it also makes other various programs including finance, entertainment, health, science and technology, interviews, and so forth. In the world there are altogether 32 television studios that belong to CNN (9 of them are in the U.S.A), meanwhile 600 news networks provide programs for
it. Thus CNN, as a news corpus, is of high capacity and authoritative enough for corpus study.
The software we adopted in this paper is Foxpro 6.0 which can deal with various kinds of language texts. Since the computer is used, we do the Tokenization and Lemmatization to separate the 120 thousand words news corpus into respective word, at the same time, the frequency is calculated, this is quite available to the comparative study. The adoption of Key word 5 make the uses of nodes very clear and easy to see, and through this we can do our research and study successfully.
3 Overall distribution
The tokens in news corpus are 110795, and the types of it are 11668. The frequency of "so" and "such" in news corpus are 182 and 87 compare to the 215 and 109 in a Spoken corpus, this shows that the percentage of use of "so" and "such" is a little bit lower of that in Spoken corpus. The details of the uses of "so" and "such" in News corpus are as follows:
3.1"so" in news corpusA, In like manner or degree: correlative with as, always in negative expression.Eg:"The al Qaeda are soobviously part of a terrorist network as opposed to being;B, To such a degree, in such manner, correlative with that.Eg: our family's privacy during this difficult time sothat we can help our daughter;C,For this or that reason; such being the case, accordingly; therefore (in this use equivalent to a conjunction) Eg: situation up sothey could claim they were investing;D, There about, more or less. Eg: Well it's a fairly quiet three days or sowith the baseball;E, To a degree that needs emphasis. Eg:so much more important in a global context;F, Just as stated. Eg: Ifsothey were disappointed;G, Used also to gather up and repeat an idea with emphasis,Eg:and sois the new leader.
3.2"such" in news corpusA, To such a degree:Eg: "It was sucha relief from the regular routine of;B, Very:Eg: Sucha person or thing;C, Such as:Eg: You are a beautiful girl, suchas fairy.
4Conclusion
"So" and "such" are two commonly used adverbs in English, they are high frequency wordsin English, esp. in spoken English. "so"and "such"are usedless often in News corpus in the respective of quantity. From the data listed above, we draw the conclusion that "so" always combine with "that" and used as conjunctives( units larger than single words which function as conjunctions ) in news language. Andmost of the time it is used as the adverb of degree. “such”has a lower frequency than “so”does in news corpus.
References
[1]Biber D，Johansson S & Leech G.朗文英语口语和笔语语法[M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社,2000
[2]何安平.语料库语言学与英语教学[M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社,2004
[3]Richards J C., Platt J.and Platt H. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics.Addison Longman.China,1998.
[4]杨惠中.语料库语言学导论[M].上海：上海外语教育出版社，2002：4
【Key Words】so; such; frequency;news
【中图分类号】G642【文献标识码】A【文章编号】1005-1074(2009)05-0117-01
1Introduction
1.1Definition of Adverb According to the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, adverb is a word that describes or adds to the meaning of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a sentence, and which answers such questions ashow?'Where?' orwhen?'One type of adverb is characterized by the morphological feature" ly"For example: happily, quickly, etc.Obviously, these items have a regular correspondence to certain adjectives and said to derive from the corresponding adjective forms. Another type of adverbs includes now, then, later, earlier and yet another, here, there, everywhere.
1.2The functions of adverbsThere are several types of adverbs in terms of function. Adverbs of manner, (quickly), adverbs of time (now), and adverbs of place (here). Items like seldom, never, often, frequently, always, invariably are sometimes described as adverbs of frequency; Upwards, downwards, sideways, left, right, forwards, backwards and so on are often called directional adverbs. Another set includes such items as however, moreover, nevertheless, thus, consequently, finally, and closely related to this group; Frankly, honestly, clearly, apparently, both these types often occur at the beginning of a clause and they are sometimes called sentence adverbs.Halliday suggests that one of the primary functions of adverbs is as the head word of a group functioning as adjunct at the rank of clause.Adjuncts,as their name suggests, are slightly peripheral in a way that the others are not. It is an element that has not got the potential of being subject. It is typically realized by an adverbial group or a prepositional phrase.It is part of the basic structure of the clause or sentence in which it occurs, and modifies the verb. Adverbs of time, place, frequency, degree, and manner, are examples of adjunct. For example：①He die in England；②I have almost finish.Adjuncts fall into three subtypes: model, circumstantial and conjunctive. Corresponding more or less to the three metafunctions: ideational, textual and interpersonal.
2Material used and research methodology
Corpus-based analysis is empirical analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts. It utilizes a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as "corpus", as the basis for analysis, it makes extensive use of computers for analysis, using both automatic and interactive techniques. Also, it depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques, so corpus-driven analysis is a kind of analysis with high reliability and validity and in nowadays' linguistic research field, it is commonly and widely be used. It should be seen as a complementary approach to more traditional approaches.
Since corpus is involved, in this paper the News corpus with about 110000 words, selected from CNN, is adopted. It is well known that CNN (cable news networks) is the most famous cable news network all over the world. CNN is founded in 1980; at that time it had only 1700000 users, while nowadays the number has increased to 80000000. CNN is famous for its continuous most rapid and authoritative report on the international information during 24 hours. In addition CNN is regarded as one of the most popular, reliable sources of news and information throughout the world. CNN can provide the live report for audience and analyze the unexpected incidents. Besides it also makes other various programs including finance, entertainment, health, science and technology, interviews, and so forth. In the world there are altogether 32 television studios that belong to CNN (9 of them are in the U.S.A), meanwhile 600 news networks provide programs for
it. Thus CNN, as a news corpus, is of high capacity and authoritative enough for corpus study.
The software we adopted in this paper is Foxpro 6.0 which can deal with various kinds of language texts. Since the computer is used, we do the Tokenization and Lemmatization to separate the 120 thousand words news corpus into respective word, at the same time, the frequency is calculated, this is quite available to the comparative study. The adoption of Key word 5 make the uses of nodes very clear and easy to see, and through this we can do our research and study successfully.
3 Overall distribution
The tokens in news corpus are 110795, and the types of it are 11668. The frequency of "so" and "such" in news corpus are 182 and 87 compare to the 215 and 109 in a Spoken corpus, this shows that the percentage of use of "so" and "such" is a little bit lower of that in Spoken corpus. The details of the uses of "so" and "such" in News corpus are as follows:
3.1"so" in news corpusA, In like manner or degree: correlative with as, always in negative expression.Eg:"The al Qaeda are soobviously part of a terrorist network as opposed to being;B, To such a degree, in such manner, correlative with that.Eg: our family's privacy during this difficult time sothat we can help our daughter;C,For this or that reason; such being the case, accordingly; therefore (in this use equivalent to a conjunction) Eg: situation up sothey could claim they were investing;D, There about, more or less. Eg: Well it's a fairly quiet three days or sowith the baseball;E, To a degree that needs emphasis. Eg:so much more important in a global context;F, Just as stated. Eg: Ifsothey were disappointed;G, Used also to gather up and repeat an idea with emphasis,Eg:and sois the new leader.
3.2"such" in news corpusA, To such a degree:Eg: "It was sucha relief from the regular routine of;B, Very:Eg: Sucha person or thing;C, Such as:Eg: You are a beautiful girl, suchas fairy.
4Conclusion
"So" and "such" are two commonly used adverbs in English, they are high frequency wordsin English, esp. in spoken English. "so"and "such"are usedless often in News corpus in the respective of quantity. From the data listed above, we draw the conclusion that "so" always combine with "that" and used as conjunctives( units larger than single words which function as conjunctions ) in news language. Andmost of the time it is used as the adverb of degree. “such”has a lower frequency than “so”does in news corpus.
References
[1]Biber D，Johansson S & Leech G.朗文英语口语和笔语语法[M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社,2000
[2]何安平.语料库语言学与英语教学[M].北京：外语教学与研究出版社,2004
[3]Richards J C., Platt J.and Platt H. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics.Addison Longman.China,1998.
[4]杨惠中.语料库语言学导论[M].上海：上海外语教育出版社，2002：4