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Polarity Sensitivity of Minimal Degree Adverbs in Modern Chinese

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9332))

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Abstract

Based on the semantic and pragmatic analysis of the typical Chinese minimal degree adverbs, as well as their relative frequency in corpora, this paper examines the polarity sensitivity of these adverbs. Evidence shows that shaowei (a little) and xiewei (a little bit) are positive polarity items (PPIs) while hao (a little) and sihao (a bit) are negative polarity items (NPIs). The research findings also indicate that the semantics is not the only factor that determines the polarity of minimal degree words, the pragmatics and frequency of the examined words must also be taken into account when deciding their polarity sensitivity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Language and Language Education, China Central Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China

    Zhong Wu

  2. Wuhan University of Engineering Science, Wuhan, 430200, Hubei, China

    Zhong Wu & Lihua Li

Authors
  1. Zhong Wu
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  2. Lihua Li
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhong Wu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Qin Lu

  2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Helena Hong Gao

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Wu, Z., Li, L. (2015). Polarity Sensitivity of Minimal Degree Adverbs in Modern Chinese. In: Lu, Q., Gao, H. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27193-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27194-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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