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Article published In: Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 3:1 (2022) ► pp.36–59

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What is the opposite of Henduo ‘many’ in Mandarin?

 | Wayne State University
Published online: 5 July 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.21019.liu
Abstract
This article first studies the contrastive properties of Q-adjectives many and few, as well as henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ in Mandarin from the perspective of their strengths as determiners (Milsark, Gary. (1974). Existential Sentences in English. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. & . (1977). Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential construction in English. Linguistic Analysis 31, 1–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Although all falling into the weak-determiner category for being existential and indefinite, many/henduo show more properties as leaning towards strong definiteness and universal quantification than few/henshao. Secondly, because of the kind-demoting mass NP nature of Chinese nouns and the fact that Mandarin is a topic-comment pro-drop language, henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ can appear both in the pre-nominal attributive and the predicative positions, unlike their English counterparts many and few that cannot be used as predicates due to the token-denoting nature of English nouns and that English is not a pro-drop language. I also argue that the determiner strengths demonstrated by Q-adjectives are not related to indefinite specificity.
Article outline
  • 1.Properties of Q-adjectives in Chinese and English
  • 2.Strong and weak determiners
  • 3.Differences among Q-adjectives
  • 4.Determiner strength ≠ indefinite specificity
  • 5.What is henduo ‘many’ and what is henshao ‘few’?
  • 6.Why in Chinese books are many?
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (62)
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