漢語的話題、焦點及全稱量化研究

The notion of topic, the syntactic position(s) of topic, topic markers, aboutness condition, the relationship between topic and subject/focus and so on are discussed in the previous studies. Li & Thompson (1976) point out that Chinese is a topic-prominent language. Chao (1968), Chafe (1976), Li & Thompson (1981), Xu & Langendoen (1985), etc. discuss the aboutness condition of topic. Portner and Yabushita (1998) claim that “the semantic representation of the topic phrase must be part of the sentence’s background” (p149). Xu & Liu (1998, 2007) review the literature about topic and examine many related important issues in Mandarin Chinese. Shi (2000) argues that Chinese does not have dangling topic, though Pan& Hu (2008) think it does. They propose a unified account for both moved and dangling topics in Mandarin by their topic licensing condition. Hu & Pan (2009) further decompose the aboutness condition into two subconditions: topic licensing condition and topic interpretation condition. Focus is the prominent part of a sentence. Information focus and contrastive focus are two important kinds of focus. Xu (2004a) points out that in general information focus is at the post-verbal position in Mandarin, and Xu (2002) considers Chinese as a discourse configurational language. Semantic focus is a kind of contrastive focus, which can influence the truth condition of a sentence under consideration. Moreover, it usually associates with a focus-sensitive operator/adverb that will trigger a tripartite structure. Xu & Pan (2005) introduce the studies on the semantics and structures of focus and provide discussions on issues related to Chinese negation. Quantification is a hot issue in formal semantics, which includes determiner quantification and adverbial quantification, and can be represented by tripartite structures. The tripartite structure of determiner quantification is mainly determined by syntax, whereas the tripartite structure of adverbial quantification is affected by the position of semantic focus. This paper will report the studies on the semantics of Chinese dou (‘all’), mei (‘every’), quan (‘all’), suoyou (‘all’) and the adverbial ge (‘each’), which can all express universal quantification.