Abstract
In this paper, we provide an empirical description and a theoretical analysis of the adverbial use of
hǎo ‘(lit.) good’, lǎo ‘(lit.) old’, and guài ‘(lit.) strange’ in Mandarin
Chinese. The three adverbs represent a small yet theoretically interesting class of lexical items. Because they manifest certain
similarities to canonical degree adverbs such as hěn ‘very’ and fēicháng ‘extremely’, they have
been usually treated as pure degree adverbs in the descriptive linguistics literature. Empirical evidence, however, shows that
these adverbs actually fuse together both degree intensification and expressive meanings. For instance, they convey strong emotion
on the part of the speaker and cannot appear in non-veridical contexts such as negation, modals, information-seeking questions,
and antecedents of conditionals. We argue that hǎo, lǎo, and guài are mixed-content lexical
items. Based on their empirical behaviors, we follow recent advances in multidimensional semantics to propose a hybrid formal
analysis of hǎo, lǎo, and guài by incorporating degree semantics into a multidimensional logic
for conventional implicature.
Firm size, government capacity, and regional environmental regulation: Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from China
