Chinese polarity items

Abstract

The polarity phenomena are pervasively observed in natural languages. Polarity Item (PI) is named after its sensitive nature to the negation or affirmation property of sentences recognized as 'Polarity Sensitivity'. Concerning the cross-linguistic polarity phenomena, there are two significant approaches of polarity theories. First, the Downward Entailment (DE) approach argues that polarity items are sensitive to the monotonicity of the sentence containing them (cf. Ladusaw 1979, Landman & Kadmon 1993, Lahiri1997, Kratzer 2004, Chierchia 2006, among others). Second, the Non-veridicality approach holds that polarity items are sensitive to the (non)veridicality of the sentence containing them (cf. Zwart 1995, Lin 1998, Giannakidou1998, 2001, among others). In line with the second approach, previous studies on Chinese polarity items treat non-veridicality as the licensor as elaborated in Lin (1998)'s Non-Entailment-of-Existence Condition, Li (1991)'s non-positively-fixed truth condition, and a reformulation of these two pieces of work by Giannakidou and Cheng (2005, 2008) in terms of non-veridicality and intensionality. This study, by reanalyzing the relevant data, compares these two approaches and their applications in the study of Mandarin polarity phenomena. I argue for a DE approach toward Mandarin polarity items. I further demonstrate that only under this condition are the non-interrogative 'shenme NP', 'na +CL +NP', and 'renhe NP' licensed, and that non-veridicality is neither necessary nor sufficient for licensing polarity items. To rebut the non-veridicality approach, this thesis also scrutinizes the co-occurrence of the polarity items and 'dou', which is quite common in Mandarin and is not subject to the constraint of veridicality or non-veridicality. Adopting Tripartite Structure as the analytical tool, this thesis treats 'dou' as a universal quantifier that introduces a tripartite structure in line with Pan (2006). Thus, all different interpretations of 'dou' receive a unified account and the differences are reflected via the diverse mapping mechanisms between the sentence components and the restriction domain/nuclear scope. Due to the DE property of the restriction domain, the co-occurence between 'dou' and polarity items could be accounted for by the licensing power of DE. In this way, I attribute this particular linguistic phenomenon in Mandarin to the scope of universal grammar and provide for another time a strong support for the DE approach toward polarity items. It has long been observed that one function of polarity items is Domain Widening which induces a maximal domain in NP and the resulting DP could only be licensed in a DE environment (Landman & Kadmon 1993, Chierchia 2006). This thesis further emphasizes that DE is not assessed on the surface level or any other linguistic level, but with respect to the restriction domain of the relevant tripartite structure where Domain Widening relies on. Being simpler and having more extensive explanatory power than von Fintel (1999)'s resolution as it is, the remedy proposed in this study successfully rescues the DE approach. Last but not least, the Chinese polarity items behave rather differently from one another; such non-uniformity will also be scrutinized and accounted for within the DE framework. Concentrating on the different morphological structures of 'renhe' and 'shenme', I propose that 'renhe', as a universal quantifier, is used as a free choice item; whereas 'shenme' is a negative polarity item and is more frequently used as an existential quantifier. The different behavior of shenme and na-CL is a result of the (non)D-linking property they have. D-linked na-CL presupposes a non-empty given set and prefers a sentence initial position.

Date of Award	15 Feb 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Haihua PAN (Supervisor)