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

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 dà construction. In this constructi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of East Asian linguistics 2020-05, Vol.29 (2), p.119-157
Main Author: Liu, Chen-Sheng Luther
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chinese
Comparative Linguistics
Japanese
Language and Literature
Linguistics
Social Sciences
Theoretical Linguistics
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Summary: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 dà construction. In this construction, degrees are compositionally introduced by the literally vacuous adjective dà ‘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 dà ‘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.
ISSN:0925-8558
1572-8560
DOI:10.1007/s10831-020-09206-8