| Acknowledgements | 第5-6页 |
| 摘要 | 第6-8页 |
| Abstract | 第8-10页 |
| Chapter 1 Introduction | 第15-19页 |
| 1.1 Research Background | 第15-16页 |
| 1.2 Significance of the Study | 第16-17页 |
| 1.3 An Overview of the Thesis | 第17-19页 |
| Chapter 2 Literature Review | 第19-31页 |
| 2.1 Definition of Downtoners | 第19-20页 |
| 2.2 Studies on Downtoners | 第20-24页 |
| 2.3 Sinclair's Extended Units of Meaning | 第24-31页 |
| 2.3.1 Definition of collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody | 第25-28页 |
| 2.3.2 Studies on the Applications of Extended Units of Meaning | 第28-31页 |
| Chapter 3 Research Design | 第31-39页 |
| 3.1 Research Questions | 第31页 |
| 3.2 Research Methodology | 第31-36页 |
| 3.2.1 CIA | 第31-34页 |
| 3.2.2 Corpora Used in this Research | 第34-36页 |
| 3.2.2.1 SECCL | 第34-35页 |
| 3.2.2.2 COCA | 第35-36页 |
| 3.2.3 Tools Used in this Research | 第36页 |
| 3.3 Data Collection | 第36-39页 |
| Chapter 4 Results and Discussion | 第39-62页 |
| 4.1 The Comparison of Frequency of Almost in SECCL and COCA | 第39-40页 |
| 4.2 The Comparison of Collocation of Almost in SECCL and COCA | 第40-50页 |
| 4.3 The Comparison of Colligation of Almost in SECCL and COCA | 第50-56页 |
| 4.4 The Comparison of Semantic Preference of Almost in SECCL and COCA | 第56-59页 |
| 4.5 The Comparison of Semantic Prosody of Almost in SECCL and COCA | 第59-62页 |
| Chapter 5 Conclusion | 第62-70页 |
| 5.1 Major Findings | 第62-64页 |
| 5.2 Implications and Limitations | 第64-70页 |
| References | 第70-75页 |
| Appendices | 第75-89页 |
| Appendix Ⅰ:Collocates of almost in COCA | 第75-83页 |
| Appendix Ⅱ:The University of Pennsylvania(Penn)Treebank Tag-set | 第83-89页 |
| Publication | 第89页 |
