摘要
This paper investigates the phenomenon of imbalance between the frequencies of the nice and Adj and Adj and nice patterns from the perspective of humans’ social and limited-processing-capacity attributes. Humans’ social attribute requires that language users stay informative with minimal effort in communication, resulting in the from-the-least-to-the-most-informative information organization in discourse. Their limited-processing-capacity attribute requires that they resort to the production biases of "easy first" and "plan reuse" in order to achieve communicative efficiency in real-time production. The analysis of the occurrences of the nice and Adj pattern and native speakers’ judgment of the degree of informativeness of nice in these occurrences suggest that nice is largely delexicalized. Such delexicalization makes nice and Adj consistent with the information organization and allows language users to stay informative with the use of the pattern, thus in line with the social attribute, but not Adj and nice. In the meantime, nice is not only highly frequent but also conceptually salient when it comes to the positive property(Panther & Thornburg, 2009), making nice and Adj easier to produce and more likely to be reused than Adj and nice, thus in line with the limited-processing-capacity attribute. The analysis of the unbalanced frequency of the two patterns suggests that human attributes should be considered when studying language form, and this should offer insights into English learning.
本文研究nice and Adj和Adj and nice出现频率的不平衡现象,从人的社会属性和有限加工能力属性分析。人的社会属性要求人在交流中以最省力的方式提供有用信息,导致话语中由少至多信息组织。人的有限加工能力属性导致产出偏好——人在交流中先产出容易的和重复运用,以实现实时快速产出。分析nice and Adj的出现环境和本族语者对nice在这些环境中提供有用信息的程度的评判表明,nice在很大程度上去词汇化了。去词汇化了的nice使得nice and Adj与由少至多信息组织一致,因而能提供有用信息,符合人的社会属性,但使得Adj and nice不一致,因而不能提供有用信息。同时,nice不仅是高频词,而且在表达积极意义时概念显著(Panther&Thornburg,2009),使得产出niceand Adj更容易,因而也更有可能被重复运用,符合人的有限加工能力属性。对nice and Adj和Adj and nice出现频率不平衡现象的分析表明,研究语言形式时需要考虑人的基本属性。本研究对英语学习也有所启示。
