The adjective dà in Taiwanese Mandarin: degree, measurement and roots

Abstract

This study shows how what has been originally ascribed to the ‘lexicon’ is ‘distributed’ among different components of syntax and how degrees are compositionally introduced across categories by investigating the syntax and semantics of the Taiwanese Mandarin X hěn da construction. In this construction, degrees are compositionally introduced by the literally vacuous adjective da ‘DA’, which contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events or states to their measures along various dimensions (Wellwood in Linguist Philos 38(1):67–101, 2015). Syntactically, the constituent hěn da ‘HEN DA’ functions to be predicated of the root of the X component at the root-level, and the root later must move into the corresponding light head position to be categorically defined.