ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the main theoretical issues surrounding the adjectival class in Modern Chinese. One feature of the adjectival class in Chinese setting it clearly apart from verbs that has mostly been overlooked is reduplication. The chapter proposes evidence for the status of adjectives as an independent word class in Mandarin Chinese, both as the instantiation of a universal prototype and as a language-specific category, based on Paul's distributional analysis. It discusses the characteristics of functionally based and semantically based subclasses of adjectives, highlighting the complexity of this word class. The chapter also discusses the category of 'non-attributive' or 'predicative-only' adjectives, arguing that they actually do not represent a separate (sub-)class in Mandarin Chinese, as they often behave just as 'regular' adjectives. The intense theoretical debate on the nature of adjectives and, more generally, of word classes in Modern Chinese has apparently had a limited impact on language teaching materials.
