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The Expressive Content of the Ad-Adjectival tai ‘too’ in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Large Online Corpora

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

There are two competing analyses for the semantics of the ad-adjectival modifier tai ‘too’ in Mandarin Chinese. On the homophonous account, there are two tais: one tai is a canonical degree adverb, while the other is a subjective intensifier expressing the speaker’s evaluation. On the unified account, tai is essentially a degree adverb, and the subjective evaluation of tai is attributed to pragmatic inferencing in the pragmatic domain. Both of these accounts face empirical challenges. An alternative analysis in the multidimensional, use-conditional framework is proposed. On the present account, the meanings of tai operate on two dimensions: in the descriptive (truth-conditional) dimension, tai contributes some degree-related semantics, while in the expressive (use-conditional) dimension, tai contributes some expressive meaning expressing the speaker’s subjective (mostly negative) evaluation towards x holding to a high degree. Data from large collections of online commodity reviews (more than 12,000 reviews; over 335,000 characters) provides quantitative support for this multidimensional analysis.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under grant #16BYY006 to Qiongpeng Luo, the Postgraduate Education Reform Project of Jiangsu Province under grant #KYZZ16_0016 and DFG-SFB 991 to Fan Liu. We thank the audience at CLSW 2018 for helpful comments and feedback. All errors remain our own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Qiongpeng Luo & Fan Liu

Authors
  1. Qiongpeng Luo
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  2. Fan Liu
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Correspondence to Qiongpeng Luo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

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Luo, Q., Liu, F. (2018). The Expressive Content of the Ad-Adjectival tai ‘too’ in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Large Online Corpora. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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