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Abstract Abstract: A diachronic and dynamic probe into the semantic relations and complexity of English adverbs helps understand how meanings are originated, extended and changed. All the data of English adverb AGAIN are collected from Oxford English Dictionary, COHA and MED corpora, ranging from the years of 993 to 2009. This paper uses VNC method to cluster temporally adjacent data to classify the semantic development of English adverb AGAIN into nine stages. After the semantic distribution and frequency of different meanings of the word on nine stages is manually analyzed with the observation of randomly chosen 598 examples, and the rules and motivation for how different readings are generated and developed are dug out. It is found that semantic changes of English adverb AGAIN are triggered by such factors as category attributes, metaphor, metonymy and subjectivity. The present study offers an interpretation to lexical grammaticalization and verifies the rational existence of polysemy of words as well.
Key words: English adverb AGAIN; semantic changes; VNC; subjectivity; grammaticalization
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