The Semantic Properties and Syntactic Behaviors of the Complex Forms of Chinese Adjectives —A discussion based on four southern Chinese dialects

Abstract

It has been quite long ago that Chinese researchers have noticed that adjectives can be divided into “simple” vs. “complex” types (Zhu Dexi, 1956 et al.). This paper focuses on the syntactic behaviors and semantic properties of the complex forms of adjectives. We propose that the so-called “descriptive adjectives” or “complex adjectives” are actually phrases syntactically, with the semantic property of type. Such a view can uniformly explain the various syntactic behaviors of the complex forms of adjectives in Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects. To support our proposal, we have selected the data from four southern Chinese dialects to demonstrate that the use of the function word, namely “de (的)”, in the complex form of adjectives indicates the phrasal status of the complex form in question. It is also shown that the distribution of “的” is heterogeneous in the four dialects investigated and represents different levels of language operation: some use of “的” functions as a word formation suffix in the complex form of adjectives, some, as a semantic type marker at the syntactic level, and some others, as subjective markers driven by a mood requirement observed for Chinese dialects.