Degree intensifiers as expressives in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we provide an empirical description and a theoretical analysis of the adverbial use ofhǎo‘(lit.) good’,lǎo‘(lit.) old’, andguài‘(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 ashěn‘very’ andfēicháng‘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 thathǎo, lǎo, andguàiare mixed-content lexical items. Based on their empirical behaviors, we follow recent advances in multidimensional semantics to propose a hybrid formal analysis ofhǎo, lǎo, andguàiby incorporating degree semantics into a multidimensional logic for conventional implicature.