Mapping to a scale: Mandarin 'even'-like 'dou' with hyperbolic comparatives

Abstract

Hyperbole is a common figure of speech widely used cross-linguistically. This paper delves into a hyperbole-related puzzle in Mandarin comparatives observed by Yin (1995): Mandarin bi (than) comparatives intended for a hyperbolic interpretation are degraded in the sense that improved in the presence of dou. We note that dou in such uses is most naturally glossed as English even. This paper aims to address, in particular, why dou helps to improve such uses significantly; to this end, it draws on updated insights from three independent fields, i.e., hyperbole, the semantics of dou, and even-like particles in general. More concretely, it integrates three independently motivated assumptions: (i) hyperboles involve mapping from a factual scale to an evaluative/affective scale (Nouwen, 2024), (ii) dou is an even-like particle (Liao, 2011; Liu, 2017; Chen and Greenberg, 2022), and (iii) even-like particles necessarily map their prejacent and its alternatives to a contextually salient scale (Greenberg, 2018; Zhang, 2022). In light of such assumptions, we propose that dou improves hyperbolic bi comparatives in Mandarin because it encodes scale mapping that is required by but lacking in hyperbolic bi comparatives, and we formally implement this idea via Chen and Greenberg’s (2022) degree-based semantics of dou. Beyond addressing this puzzle, this work is of potential interest to the study of hyperboles in general, a phenomenon that has ‘historically resisted formal analysis’ in Feinmann’s (2023) words.