@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/alal.21019.liu, author = "Liu, Haiyong", title = "What is the opposite of Henduo ‘many’ in Mandarin?", journal= "Asian Languages and Linguistics", year = "2022", volume = "3", number = "1", pages = "36-59", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.21019.liu", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/alal.21019.liu", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "2665-9336", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "indefinite non-specific", keywords = "Q-adjectives", keywords = "determiner", keywords = "Mandarin Chinese", keywords = "quantification", keywords = "indefinite specific", abstract = "Abstract

This article first studies the contrastive properties of Q-adjectives many and few, as well as henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘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, many/henduo show more properties as leaning towards strong definiteness and universal quantification than few/henshao. Secondly, because of the kind-demoting mass NP nature of Chinese nouns and the fact that Mandarin is a topic-comment pro-drop language, henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ can appear both in the pre-nominal attributive and the predicative positions, unlike their English counterparts many and few 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.", }