The Institute for Chinese Studies presents the "China in Transition" Lecture Series.
"Degree Intensifiers as Expressives in Mandarin Chinese"
Zhiguo Xie, Assistant Professor
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
Flyer: 
Zhiguo Xie Flyer.pdf
Abstract: In this lecture, I discuss the empirical behavior of the adverbial use of 好hǎo ‘(lit.) good’, 老 lǎo ‘(lit.) old’, and 怪 guài ‘(lit.) strange’ in Mandarin Chinese. These adverbs form a small yet theoretically interesting class. Because they manifest certain similarities to canonical degree adverbs like 很hěn ‘very’ and 非常fēicháng ‘extremely’, in the descriptive linguistics literature they have been generally treated as pure degree adverbs. Empirical evidence shows, however, that these adverbs actually fuse together degree and expressivity. For instance, they convey strong emotions on the part of the speaker, and cannot appear in such contexts as negation, modals, questions, and antecedents of conditionals. Based on the empirical behavior of these adverbs, I propose an analysis by incorporating degree semantics into a multidimensional logic for conventional implicature.
Bio: Zhiguo Xie is Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. His research primarily focuses on Chinese syntax, semantics, and syntax-semantics interface. He has worked on such topics as questions, modals, and degree expressions. His articles havee appeared in The Linguistic Review, Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Language and Linguistics, and other publications.
