程度結構的焦點成分――以「太」字結構為例

The Focus Component in Degree Constructions: Some Remarks on the Tai Construction

本文從中文「太」字結構的角度來探討程度結構中的兩個問題。一是文獻中所討論的帶範域程度詞常被分析為量化詞，但是典型量化詞卻無法和程度論元組合。二是文獻中對於程度詞是否有帶範域以及是否有移位仍有爭論。本文採用Rooth（1985）等現代焦點理論的看法，主張「太」字結構為焦點結構之一員，且此結構為等級焦點結構。同時，基於中文的語料，本文也主張「太」字結構中存在著焦點移位。本文的證據來源包括「太」與焦點敏感詞「連」在焦點語意上的種種共通性、「太」與「了」的共現現象的句法特性以及相關的句法區域性效應等。

This article investigates two issues in the study of degree constructions, with a special focus on the tai construction in Mandarin Chinese. One issue is the fact that although previous studies tend to regard putative scope-bearing degree expressions as quantifiers, typical quantifiers cannot merge with degree arguments. The other is the controversy about whether degree expressions are scope-bearing at all. The article adopts Rooth(1985) and subsequent studies' definition of focus and argues that the tai construction is a focus construction, and it is a scalar focus construction. Furthermore, based on Mandarin data, it also argues that the construction involves focus movement. The evidence comes from the parallelisms between the tai construction and the lian construction in terms of their focus semantic properties, the cooccurrence of tai and sentence-final-le and their syntactic properties, and relevant syntactic locality effects.