"Enough"and"More"——On the Quantitative Character of"Gou"and Its Adverbial Conventional Usage
This paper examines the quantitative features of"够"in its use and evolution.The word"gou"can be combined with nouns,verbs and adjectives to form constructional groups.With the increment of subjec-tivity,"gou"is deflated from the objective sufficient quantity to the abstract degree quantity while it evolves from a verb of judgment to an adverb of degree.The fictionalization of semantic magnitudes led to the evolution of the verb"gou"into a degree adverb.The grammaticalization level is non-homogeneous,when it modifies ad-jectives the degree is the highest.The function of"gou"has been transformed from objective quantitative as-sessment to subjective fuzzy qualitative assessment.