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Article published In:
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Vol. 9:2 (2022) ► pp.197–231

The quantity adjective duō in Chinese and the event quantity construction

| National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

In the duō event quantity construction, duō ‘much’ is a quantity adjective. What duō ‘much’ modifies is the root of the verb and the root has to move to the light verb position to be categorically defined. The quantity adjective duō ‘much’ functions to introduce a measure function which measures the event denoted by the verb along the dimension valued by the assignment function A, and the domain to which the measure function applies must be monotonic. So, the ‘modification’ relation between the quantity adjective duō ‘much’ and its modifyee essentially differs from that between a typical gradable adjective like tián ‘sweat’ and its modifyee. This explains how the quantity adjective duō ‘much’ differs from the typical adjective in syntax and semantics.

Keywords: event, measure function, monotonicity, quantity adjective, root
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The properties of the duō event quantity construction
    • 2.1The syntactic properties
    • 2.2The semantic properties
  • 3.Preliminaries
    • 3.1 Huang et al. (2009): The argument structure of Chinese lexical verbs
    • 3.2 Harley (2009)
    • 3.3 Wellwood (2015)
    • 4.Proposal: A root-based analysis
    • 5.Implications
      • 5.1The modifyee of ‘Deg duō’
      • 5.2The marker de
      • 5.3The types of aktionsarten
    • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.21005.liu
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