In this paper, we provide an empirical description and a theoretical analysis of the adjectival zhen 'real' and jia 'fake' in Mandarin Chinese. The two adjectives manifest resistance to degree modifiers, and thus have been traditionally treated as non-gradable adjectives. Empirical evidence, however, shows that they can actually fuse both degree intensification and expressive meanings together. Based on their semantic behaviors, we follow recent advances in multidimensional semantics to propose that zhen and jia are mixed items with bi-dimensional semantics, i.e., the judge of truth-value as the descriptive meaning, and the degree of similarity/deviation between the facts and the subjective expectations as the expressive meaning.
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