Title

Chinese Disyllabic Descriptive Adjectives: Gradability and Reduplication

Author

Chen-sheng Luther Liu

Genre

Article

Pages

325-359

Download

PDF

Language

English

Key words

covert degree marker, disyllabic descriptive adjective, explicit

comparison, gradable, reduplication

Abstract

　　As the state-denoting meaning of its first component gets more and more bleached, nowadays the disyllabic descriptive adjective has transmuted into a gradable adjective. However, the state-denoting meaning of the first component does not totally die out; the disyllabic descriptive adjective, therefore, can only occur with some specific type of degree modifiers. So, the conflict between the assumption made by previous studies like Zhu (1980) that adjectives able to undergo reduplication must be gradable and the observation made by them that disyllabic descriptive adjectives cannot occur with any degree adverb can be solved. For the disyllabic descriptive adjective, the reduplication morphology functions to revive the degree operator function of the first component and make it able to bind and saturate the degree argument of the second component. This distinguishes the disyllabic descriptive adjective from the disyllabic attributive adjective in the reduplication pattern.