TITLE:
An Experimental Study of the Reduplication of Gradable Adjectives in Mandarin Chinese
AUTHORS:
Heather Pan
KEYWORDS:
Gradable Adjective, Reduplication, Perceptual Inference, Mandarin Chinese
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.8,
August
31,
2020
ABSTRACT:
Compared to English, Mandarin Chinese has a rich inventory of reduplicated forms of adjectives. It has been argued that reduplicated forms of gradable adjectives convey an additional inference that the speaker has the relevant direct perceptual experience (Tang, 1988; Zhu, 2003; Liu, 2013). This article invesigates whether the reduplicated form has this additional perceptual inference for native speakers by experimental studies. Our experiment results show that the reduplicated form of scalable adjectives does not require the perceptual inference compared to its base form, contra the previous studies.