A contrastive analysis of hen and ting in Chinese

Abstract

Though hen and ting (both glossed as ‘very’), the two widely used degree adverbs in Chinese, are interchangeable in some contexts, there are a number of contexts in which they cannot be used in place of each other. To account for this, this study proposes that the locus of semantic difference between hen and ting lies in the ways by which they manipulate the standards of comparison: while hen is always associated with a norm-related standard, ting involves some contextually salient one. This novel semantics provides better prediction for and account of the distribution of hen and ting in a variety of constructions.