Focus on identity – the dark side of zìjĭ

This article deals with the syntax and semantics of intensifiers in Mandarin Chinese. Intensifiers are expressions that are functionally and distributionally comparable to non-argumental x-self in English (e.g., the king himself, or do the work oneself). Mandarin examples are zìjĭ, bĕnshēn, qīnzì, or qīinkŏu. The descriptive goal is to identify the paradigm of adnominal and agentive-adverbial intensifiers in Mandarin and to determine the individual conditions of their use. On the theoretical side, I apply the analysis of intensifiers as lexicalizations of the identity function first proposed for German to the Chinese case. The identity function takes referential DPs as arguments, or, in the agentive-adverbial use, the agentive Voice head. The identity function in itself is semantically inert, but if the intensifier is focused, alternatives to the identity function come into play. These alternatives are used to explain the contextualization patterns attested for intensifier sentences. Two competing approaches to Mandarin intensifiers are reviewed and found not to be sufficient to account for the data

Adverbial · Catalan · Linguistics · Mandarin Chinese · Physics · Syntax · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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