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The Centennial Controversy: How to Classify the Chinese Adverb Dōu?

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Book cover Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11831))

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Abstract

The centenary research history of the adverb dōu is very controversial. There are severe divergences in academic circles on how to classify the semantic and pragmatic functions of the adverb dōu. In the existing literature, there are mainly three versions: the trichotomy, the dichotomy, and the univocal. Trichotomy and Dichotomy define the semantic and pragmatic functions of each sub-dōu with synonyms in Chinese analytical formulas. This kind of description is simple, convenient, and intuitive but also relatively vague and hard to verify. Moreover, there is a lack of extractions and instructions of the distinctive oppositions for different sub-dōus. Univocal takes totalizing universal or the universal/distributive quantification as the consistent feature of the adverb dōu. The verification cannot cover all corpora of dōu, besides, it cannot evade the distinctive oppositions between dōua and dōub, which are opposite to the consistent feature. After reviewing various views on the classification of dōu in the existing literature, this paper illustrates the distinctive semantic and pragmatic oppositions between dōua and dōub. The first is the quantificational semantic features with objective truth values that dōua has, but dōub does not. The second is the pragmatic features of a subjective evaluation that dōub has, but dōua does not. So this paper approves of the Dichotomy that the adverbs dōu are dōua and dōub.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As of July 13, 2018, with the keyword of DOU or Chinese fùcí dōu, Lián …dōu, zǒngkuò fùcí dōu, fànwéi fùcí dōu, yǔqì fùcí dōu, shìjiàn liànghuà dōu… at FULink (Fujian Universities’ Digital Library, the Web site: www.fulink.edu.cn) the data has been retrieved. The result was 9,640. Then the repeated and irrelevant documents were manually excluded, and the relevant documents that the author collected in many years were added. So finally, 813 articles/works were obtained. However, this is still incomplete statistics. The list of articles/works is available to interested readers by email and is welcome to be added.

  2. 2.

    For example, Paris [49] points out that dōu has two meanings. However, what seems to be confusing is that she holds that there is only one dōu (in the footnote 1).

  3. 3.

    [68] believes that the semantic core of dōu1 includes two parallel semantic components, namely the distributive meaning and a relatively large amount. While the semantic core of dōu2 and dōu3 only contains a relatively large amount. [26] advocates that the condition of dōu should be unified to reflect a certain degree of subjective-relative-value that does not need to be quantified objectively. These two theories are too ad hoc and not commented.

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Acknowledgment

The work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 15BYY141).

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  1. Overseas Education College of Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China

    Hua Zhong

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  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

    Yangsen Zhang

  3. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

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Zhong, H. (2020). The Centennial Controversy: How to Classify the Chinese Adverb Dōu?. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_6

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