Two Types of Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper explores two types of exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese, as Badan and Cheng (2015) identified. Whilst type I exclamatives employ degree demonstratives zheme/name (this.ME/that.ME) and exclusively have the surprise reading, type II exclamatives recruit the degree quantifier duome (much.ME) and exclusively have the non-surprise reading. In this paper, a lexical approach is taken to account for the contrast in their expressions of surprise and non-surprise. The central claim is that this distinction is firmly rooted in the semantics of the degree adverbs involved. To be precise, the degree demonstrative zheme/name operates within equative comparatives, where it selects the expected degree according to the speaker's perspective as the standard of comparison, and the sense of surprise emerges when the actual degree surpasses this initial expectation. In contrast, the degree quantifier duome predominantly contributes to positive constructions, simply demanding the degree in question to be noteworthy in comparison to a contextually given standard, without invoking surprise. Moreover, their syntactic properties and the resulting compositional consequences are also discussed.