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The Interactions between degree expressions and SFPs.
Source publication
In Chengdu Chinese, degree intensification is inextricably associated with sentential functions, ranging from completing a sentence, encoding a focus to expressing exclamation. This correlation is exhibited in two ways: first, some intensifiers need to be paired with SFPs, such as the focus ni or the exclamatory no, and thus encode the relevant sen...
Context in source publication
Citations
In this paper, we investigate the semantics and syntax of the X-copy structure of [X-təu-XY] in Chengdu Chinese. The semantics of this structure is rather elusive, as evidenced by the various contexts where it may occur and diversified meanings that it exhibits across contexts. Facing the difficulty in identifying its constructional meaning, we scrutinize the interactions between contexts and implicatures and figure out, for the first time in the literature, the main function of this copy structure as metalinguistic negation. Syntactically, this copy mechanism is proved to be a type of CP negation, as opposed to the propositional negation, such as VP negation and IP negation.
This paper uses the data from relevant corpora and multimedia resources to summarize the properties and features of the usages of Lǎo (老) and Chāo (超) from the semantic, grammatical and pragmatic perspectives as well as compare them at each level. It is found that Lǎo and Chāo are highly similar in terms of usages and they both belong to the sub-highest degree adverbs of the absolute degree adverbs with some exceptions. They can modify the same components, but they have different syntactic structures. From the pragmatic perspective, both Lǎo and Chāo can express subjective attitudes and strong sentiments, but there are differences in terms of writing, new and old information, accentuation, and inversion.KeywordsDegree adverbsAbsolute degree adverbsCorpora
Lǎo
Chāo
