Syntactic and semantic nature of the nominal in the hen (very)+ N construction in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Traditionally, degree adverb hen ‘very’ in Mandarin cannot modify nominal constituents, but in modern Mandarin there is a special construction existed, which is the ‘hen+N’ construction and this has been first discussed in 1960s, and this construction became more and more popular on the internet nowadays. One of the key issues on this construction is what kind of nouns, or nouns with what kind of syntactic and semantic features can enter ‘hen+N’, and this dissertation attempted to explore the answer for this question. Methods adopted in this study mainly included two aspects, one was a description of the use of the construction in spontaneous speech with a look into BCC corpus provided by Beijing Language and Culture University Corpus Center, and the other was an offline grammaticality judgement task. Nouns were further divided into five sub-categories based on their semantics and collocation with measures, namely abstract nouns, countable individual nouns, uncountable individual nouns, collective nouns and proper nouns. Several semantic and morphological features in one sub-category or in all sub-categories which can improve the accessibility to ‘hen+N’ were found, namely (1) metaphorical meanings for all nouns, (2) quasi-suffixes on abstract nouns, (3) the feature of [+human] in countable individual nouns, (4) familiarity for speakers for proper nouns, and (5) context dependency for ‘hen+proper noun’. Nominal with these features are easier to enter ‘hen+N’ than others. Semantic analysis revealed the main reason for hen modifying nouns, that is, nouns modified by hen have descriptive semantic meanings. All syntactic and semantic features mentioned above can enlarge the range of descriptive semantic meanings of nouns, and this is why they have positive influence to nouns for entering the ‘hen+N’ construction. In general, ‘hen+N’ is more frequently used in oral conversations than written language, especially the literature text.