A Study on Native Mandarin Speakers’ Homogeneity of Degree Adverbs and Adjectives

This study aims to investigate whether scale and polarity affect the semantic acceptability of native Mandarin speakers in terms of the collocation between degree adverbs and adjectives via a native corpus analysis and a forced-choice language sense task administered to native Mandarin speakers from Taiwan. The preliminary results of the acceptability judgment task indicate that most absolute adjectives are context-independent and can stably collocate with degree adverbs, which align with the corpus study results. However, some factors were found to affect the semantic acceptability of native Mandarin speakers, such as context, subjective differences and cognitive asymmetry.