Approximate Constructions Using duo ‘more’ in Chinese

Abstract

The approximate constructions using duo ‘more’ in Chinese present some interesting puzzles for compositional semantics. This paper attempts to unveil the lexical semantics of duo by investigating its distribution and interpretation in approximate constructions. It is claimed that: (i) the distribution of duo is governed by a monotonicity restriction, that is, its domain must be defined by some mereological part-whole relations; (ii) duo is an additive particle whose semantics involves the arithmetic operations of addition (+) and multiplication (×). This novel account provides a more motivated account of the seemingly complicated distributional patterns of duo approximate expressions.