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.
著者
八木 克正 井上 亜依 磯辺 ゆかり
出版者
関西学院大学
雑誌
基盤研究(B)
巻号頁・発行日
2008

本研究の目的は、学習英文法の内容を根本的に見直し、科学的根拠を与えることにあった。好ましくない有害な英語教育の内容を洗い出すこと、変化する英語をphraseologyの立場から実態調査と分析を行い、あらたな事実を記述・説明すること、今の英語の実態を反映していない中学校や高等学校の学習内容、受験参考書や英和辞典の内容を、科学的な実態調査をもとに修正を求めるための研究活動を行い、いずれの点についても講演、論文、研究発表、著書の形で成果を公表した。