# name
Two Types of Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese

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Treballs Finals del Màster en Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge, Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2022-2023, Tutor: Jon Ander Mendia

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
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.

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Màster Oficial - Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge (CCiL)

# metadata.dc.title[].value
Two Types of Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese