A dynamic account of lian...dou in Chinese verb doubling cleft construction.

Highlights • The parse of lian involves reusing the structure projected by a scalar implicature. • Dou is an intensifier-like adverb used to reinforce the illocutionary force of the sentence containing lian...dou. • The parse of Dou suggests that the alternatives projected by a scalar implicature are true in the relevant context. Abstract This paper deals with the puzzling Chinese verb doubling construction in the schema of lian...dou (verb doubling lian...dou construction, VDLD) from a parsing perspective. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al., 2001; Cann et al., 2005) which allows the interaction between structural, semantic and pragmatic information, it is shown that VDLD can receive a straightforward explanation on the assumption that the construction is licensed by an explicit or implicit context. Specifically, it is argued that (i) the first verb marked by lian is a topicalized focus, whose parse involves reusing the structure projected by a scalar implicature; (ii) dou is an intensifier-like adverb, whose parse suggests that the alternatives projected by a scalar implicature should be true in the relevant context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]