The Syntactic And Semantic Analysis Of Scope Ambiguity Of Universal And Existential Quantifiers In Mandarin Chinese And English

Scope is an important characteristic in the interaction of quantifiers. The study of quantifier scope has always been a heated topic among formal linguists since1970's. In the framework of generative grammar, various syntactic analyses have been proposed to account for scope interpretations of sentences involving multiply quantified expressions. Many linguists May (1977, 1985), Aoun & Li (1989, 1993), Hornstein (1995), Huang (1982) assume that English shows more scope ambiguities than Chinese. However, the uniformity of quantifier scope assignment from the syntactic analysis is challenged in this paper, which holds the possibility of inverse scope in Chinese.This thesis is devoted to address the issue of the interaction of doubly quantified sentences (QP-QP sentences), especially those active and simple sentences with the universal and existential quantifiers. In this thesis, Chinese quantifier scope is syntactically and semantically discussed in terms of the semantic values of predicates and lexical properties of quantifiers. This thesis is focused on the effects of psychological verbs and the quantificational features of different quantifiers, which account for different scope displays between Chinese and English. At last as a Chinese specific characteristic, dou is introduced with the assumption that only a strong NP is dou-quantifiable. This hypothesis can account for why some structures in Mandarin Chinese are generally judged as unambiguous sentences. We will apply the feature-checking theory with chain-formation algorithm to Chinese dou-quantifiable sentences for interpreting the so-called"scope rigidity"of Chinese sentences.Based on the objective judgment of language intuitions and the overall analysis to language data, we conclude that even if English and Chinese demonstrate some contrasts in terms of quantifier scope interpretation, Chinese also shows similar scope phenomenon as English in the simple and act sentence structures. That is, Chinese sentences with quantified phrases can show scope ambiguity. However, we should admit that Chinese has her specific characteristics; especially, the dou-quantifiable sentences with quantifier arguments are always unambiguous.