著者

八木 克正

出版者

関西学院大学

雑誌

言語と文化 = 語言与文化 (ISSN:13438530)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.1-17, 2006-03-01

---

This study is a critical review on the theories widely (and erroneously) held on adverbials very and much from the perspective of semantic syntax, which I first advocated in Yagi (1999). Since then I have published many articles to prove its validity as a theory of linguistic analysis of English. Those articles cover such wide range of areas as syntax and semantics of predicative adjectives, predicative nouns, verb complementation, and such phraseological units as "pretty much," "forget it" and "forget about it," and "but also." This article has double purposes: to disprove the various fallacies about very and much, on one hand, and to prove the validity of the theory of semantic syntax on the other. An example of erroneous views on very and much is that, in the case of -ed pre-modification by much or very, very modifies adjectives and therefore -ed's modified by very are adjectives, while much modifies the past participle of the verb and the -ed's modified by much are therefore verbs in their past participle forms. Thus, the concerned in Jane is very concerned about her son is an adjective because it is modified by very, while the concerned in Jane is much concerned with appearances is the past participle of the verb concern because it is modified by much. This kind of theory, because it disregards the semantic aspects of very and much, explains very little about English grammar. It is apparent that much and very have many aspects of contrast in their syntactic behavior, and their analyses and discussions have their foci on their syntactic differences. It seems almost impossible, however, to uniformly explain why they behave so differently in syntax without taking their semantic differences into consideration. Semantic syntax is concerned with how meaning, which is not directly observable, is represented in directly observable syntactic forms. If a grammatical theory does not refer to the meanings of syntactic forms, its significance is greatly reduced. Language is not so semantically vacuous as to allow us to find explanations only in syntax. This paper explains how very and much, especially "very much" as a phraseological unit, are semantically different and, therefore, how they behave syntactically differently.