The Hybrid Content of the Scalar Focus Modifier Kua35 in the Southwest Mandarin Chinese
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_169How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- kua35; the Qiannan dialect; scalar focus modifier; hybrid content
- Abstract
This paper is intended to investigate the semantics of kua35 ‘(lit.) tasteless’ in the Qiannan dialect, a language spoken in the south of Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou Province of China. By drawing on the spirit of a bi-dimensional semantics framework, I propose that the adverbial kua35 is a scalar focus modifier with hybrid content. On the one hand, kua35 evokes a scale of a set of taste-related alternatives, ranking the alternatives of the set on the scale and singling out an alternative with maximum quantity. On the other hand, kua35 implies that the focused element is the most undesirable one under discussion. The implications of the present study are twofold: firstly, it is the first time that kua35 in the Qiannan dialect has been concerned in the spirit of generative linguistics; secondly, the investigation of kua35 provides empirical evidence for exploring the connection between at-issue meaning and non-at-issue meaning.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Shiyin Tang PY - 2022 DA - 2022/12/30 TI - The Hybrid Content of the Scalar Focus Modifier Kua³⁵ in the Southwest Mandarin Chinese BT - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 1478 EP - 1486 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_169 DO - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_169 ID - Tang2022 ER -