An investigation of relevant corpus shows that the reduplicated adjective “Haohao” often acts as the attribute and that over 95% of the attribute adjective “Haohao” suggests a relation of contrast. The verbs in those sentences containing the contrastive “Haohao” are sure to occur in perfect aspect while those containing the noncontrastive “Haohao” occur in nonperfect aspect. A review of the history of development of the Chinese language demonstrates that the reduplicated adjective “Haohao” came into being in the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, acting as adverbial only. It extended the use of attribute just in the Ming Dynasty and started to pick up the function of indicating the relation of contrast.

reduplicated adjective; attribute; relation of contrast; semantic feature