Less is more when more is more than more : a nanosyntactic analysis of Mandarin <i>duōshǎo</i>

Leu, Thomas; Tang, Wenli

Proceedings chapter

English

Less is more when more is more than more : a nanosyntactic analysis of Mandarin duōshǎo

ContributorsLeu, Thomas; Tang, Wenli

Presented atMcGill University, 3-5 June 2025

Published inGavin Bembridge (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2025 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association

First online date2025

Abstract

Mandarin duōshǎo ‘how much’ is a question word/phrase with remarkable properties: the degree question marker duō ‘how’ is syncretic with the quantifier duō ‘much’, and the quantifier part shǎo is, elsewhere, equivalent to English little. Adopting a Nanosyntactic approach, we propose a homophone-free structural analysis of duōshǎo ‘how much’ that relates the two properties.

Keywords

Nanosyntax
Mandarin
Comparative morphology
Degree
Duōshǎo
Syncretism

Affiliation entities

Citation (ISO format)

LEU, Thomas, TANG, Wenli. Less is more when more is more than more : a nanosyntactic analysis of Mandarin duōshǎo. In: Proceedings of the 2025 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association. Gavin Bembridge (Ed.). McGill University. [s.l.] : [s.n.], 2025.

Proceedings chapter (Published version)

Identifiers

PID : unige:191931

Additional URL for this publicationhttps://cla-acl.ca/pdfs/actes-2025/Leu-Tang-CLA-2025.pdf

15views

35downloads

Creation25/02/2026 17:54:52

First validation02/03/2026 17:18:45

Update05/03/2026 13:56:38

Status update05/03/2026 13:56:38

Last indexation05/03/2026 13:56:40

Archive ouverte UNIGE

Less is more when more is more than more : a nanosyntactic analysis of Mandarin duōshǎo

Technical informations