Abstract
This study provides a semantic account of the Mandarin ad-adjectival modifier hăo ‘(lit.) well’, which is a member of a family of adverbs that yield intensification, display subjectivity and parallel with speaker-oriented intensifiers in resisting nonveridical contexts. We argue that hăo is a mixed expressive item. On the one hand, it is like canonical degree adverbs, meaning some individual x holding to a high degree with respect to some gradable property. On the other, it is a conventional implicature (CI) trigger that contributes an expressive content, expressing the speaker’s strong emotion (surprise, approval, etc.) towards x holding to high degree. We propose a formal analysis of hăo by incorporating the degree semantics into the multidimensional logic.
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Luo, Q., Wang, Y. (2016). When Degree Meets Evaluativity: A Multidimensional Semantics for the Ad-adjectival Modifier hăo ‘well’ in Mandarin Chinese. In: Dong, M., Lin, J., Tang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10085. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_45
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