GE
The particle "ge 個/个" is one of the most frequent characters in written Chinese (12th in a list of 9,933 unique characters). It is generally thought of as a classifier, numerary adjunct, measure word. Indeed, it functions as the almost universal, default classifier when you're not sure what the correct / proper measure word for a given noun should be. In addition, "ge" has more than a dozen other definitions and usages, for which see Wiktionary. However, I'm not sure that any dictionary or grammar accounts for a very special usage that I have long been intrigued and enchanted by, namely the "ge" in this type of sentence:
Wǒ máng de gè yàosǐ
我忙得個要死!
"I'm so busy I could die!", i.e., "I'm incredibly busy!"
Here de 得 is a particle marking the complement of degree.
Because I lived with a big household full of Chinese (Shandong) in-laws, I picked this construction up very early in my learning of spoken Mandarin, but I always had a visceral feeling that it was extremely colloquial and unlikely to be encountered in written texts and was probably not covered in conventional grammars. So I asked around among colleagues and native speaker informants how they would explain this unusual "ge", grammatically or otherwise. Here are some of the replies I received.
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