1887
Volume 3, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2665-9336
  • E-ISSN: 2665-9344
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Abstract

Abstract

This article first studies the contrastive properties of Q-adjectives and , as well as ‘many’ and ‘few’ in Mandarin from the perspective of their strengths as determiners (Milsark, 1974 & 1977). Although all falling into the weak-determiner category for being existential and indefinite, show more properties as leaning towards strong definiteness and universal quantification than . Secondly, because of the kind-demoting mass NP nature of Chinese nouns and the fact that Mandarin is a topic-comment pro-drop language, ‘many’ and ‘few’ can appear both in the pre-nominal attributive and the predicative positions, unlike their English counterparts and that cannot be used as predicates due to the token-denoting nature of English nouns and that English is not a pro-drop language. I also argue that the determiner strengths demonstrated by Q-adjectives are not related to indefinite specificity.

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2022-07-05
2025-04-24
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