A Degree-Based Analysis of 'V+A+le2' Construction

摘要

This paper examines both the result-realization and the result-deviation interpretations of 'V+A+le2' construction under the framework of degree semantics. It is argued that the 'V+A+le2' construction is a comparative construction and that different interpretations arise because different standards of comparation are adopted. Result-realization interpretations are seen in all instances of the construction while result-deviation interpretations can be found only in instances with open-scale adjectives. The syntactic structure determines whether the 'A' encodes a measure function or the 'V+A' encodes a measure of change function in the 'V+A+le2' comparative construction.