Pragmatic application of the attributional bicategorical analysis of Chinese verbs: Focusing on the contrast between continuous and discrete quantities

This study aims to establish the category boundary of temporality, a property of verbs, based on the bicategorical analysis, and to analyze elements that traditionally grouped with the similar meaning in school grammar or those with ambiguous grammatical boundaries. First, the time expression expressed in a sentence is divided into external time and internal time, and the boundary is set through the difference between subjectivity and objectivity in the phenomenon where different components show the same aspect. For example, the difference in meaning between the temporal adverbs ‘常常’ and ‘经常’ was analyzed by applying the distance diagram, and the relationship between the adverbial words ‘就’ and ‘快’ that make up ‘near future’ was examined as the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. In addition, the opposition between discrete and continuous quantities, which forms the basis of bicategorical analysis, is expected to apply not only to adverbs of time and quantifiers but also to adverbs of frequency and degree.