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Article published In: The interface of semantics & etymology, morpho-syntax, and pragmatics in Chinese
Edited by Jeeyoung Peck
[Language and Linguistics 20:2] 2019
► pp. 256–281

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Degree intensifiers as expressives in Mandarin Chinese

 | The Ohio State University
 | Nanjing University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 5 April 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00033.xie
Abstract
In this paper, we provide an empirical description and a theoretical analysis of the adverbial use of hǎo ‘(lit.) good’, lǎo ‘(lit.) old’, and guài ‘(lit.) strange’ in Mandarin Chinese. The three adverbs represent a small yet theoretically interesting class of lexical items. Because they manifest certain similarities to canonical degree adverbs such as hěn ‘very’ and fēicháng ‘extremely’, they have been usually treated as pure degree adverbs in the descriptive linguistics literature. Empirical evidence, however, shows that these adverbs actually fuse together both degree intensification and expressive meanings. For instance, they convey strong emotion on the part of the speaker and cannot appear in non-veridical contexts such as negation, modals, information-seeking questions, and antecedents of conditionals. We argue that hǎo, lǎo, and guài are mixed-content lexical items. Based on their empirical behaviors, we follow recent advances in multidimensional semantics to propose a hybrid formal analysis of hǎo, lǎo, and guài by incorporating degree semantics into a multidimensional logic for conventional implicature.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Similarities between hǎo/lǎo/guài and canonical degree modifiers
  • 3.Differences between hǎo/lǎo/guài and canonical degree modifiers
  • 4.Theoretical background
  • 5.A multidimensional semantics of hǎo, lǎo, and guài
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Liu, Fan
2023. A Hybrid Account of the Expressivity in Mandarin Nominals. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13495], ► pp. 161 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Fan & Qiongpeng Luo
2020. Gradability, Subjectivity and the Semantics of the Adjectival zhen ‘real’ and jia ‘fake’ in Mandarin. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11831], ► pp. 165 ff. DOI logo

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