Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

similarities to the members of the BNBV inal class dealt with above, but the two should not
be equated due to the highly restricted semantics of BNBV inal predicates. Pylkkänen states
at one point that “light verb constructions are not syntactically low applicatives” (2002,
38), based on the fact that, in her view, low applied arguments (Mary in “Lou gave Mary
a cake”) cannot be modified by depictive secondary predicates, but I find her
argumentation at this point forced and I suspect that the restriction is due to the
incorporation of the applied argument into the predicate (i.e., in the middle of verb and
direct object) in English. Although it is, as Pylkkänen notes, “an open research question,”
I see no reason to exclude light verb constructions from a low applicative analysis (on the
connection between light verb constructions, secondary predication and adjectival roots,
see section 2.5 below).
Turning back to reduplicated adjectives in Mandarin, here the idea of “doing
something a little bit” is carried over into the adjectival part of the lexicon where it
exhibits the well-known grammatical category of diminutive. “The diminutive form . . .
expresses the speaker’s feeling that the referent is small, or subtle; that it endears the
speaker—in short, a speaker evaluation of undersize, restricted and affectively positive,”
whereas “the augmentative form . . . expresses the speaker’s feeling that the referent of
some lexical item is large for what it is, or to excess, if an activity; that it is repulsive to
the speaker—in short, a speaker evaluative of oversize, overmuch, and affectively
negative” (Silverstein 1981, 8). In most languages, diminutives and augmentatives are
formed through sometimes quite massive phonological deformation; in Mandarin
Chinese, however, the diminutive is indicated by reduplication of the adjectival root.
115