A Study on the Subjective Quantity Construction ‘hai VP ne’ in Modern Chinese

This paper is the first to view the commonly used construction ‘Hai VP Ne(還VP呢)’ in modern spoken Chinese as a subjective quantity construction. Through the analysis of examples with subjective characteristics from the BCC, CCL, and CVC corpora, it was found that the subjectivity of the ‘Hai VP Ne(還VP呢)’ construction manifests as the feat ure of ‘conter-expectation(反預期).’ Based on this feature, the subjective uses of the ‘Hai VP Ne(還VP呢)’ construction are categorized into three types: contrary to the speaker’s expectations(反說話人預期）, contrary to the listener’s expectations(反聽話人預期), and c ontrary to common sense expectations(反常理預期). From the perspective of quantity cate gories, the ‘Hai VP Ne(還VP呢)’ construction contains sub-quantity and tone. As a subje ctive quantity construction, its constructional meanings can be summarized as: subjective maximum, subjective minimum, subjective emotion and evaluation.