Subject Quantifiers And Monotonicity

In this thesis, considering monotonicity as the property of the determiners, we primarily focus on the systematic investigation of the determiners'subject monotonicity, trying to pursuit the answers to the following question: are there any semantic universals underlying the subject monotonicity of the determiners'?The study of monotonicity from the perspective of logic semantics has been approached in the past twenty years. During these twenty years, the linguists not only extend the concept of the monotonicity to the determiners, but also try to approach it more deeply in the field of psychology, language acquisition and even syntax. However, as for the investigation on the Chinese monotone determiners, there are few or nearly no studies concerning it. Thus, in the last chapter, we try to give a full illustration for the monotone determiners in Mandarin Chinese. And also we make a cross-linguistic comparison between these two languages'determiners on the monotonicity. It is hoped that such study may lend itself to reveal the internal mechanism of the natural languages and also how universal grammar works cross-linguistically.Owing to the fact that it is impractical to investigate the phenomenon by listing the family of determiners exhaustively, in this thesis, we just focus on the investigation of typical examples of monotone determiners.This thesis just based on the investigations on the English determiners which we will divide into two types: one is the non-fuzzy determiners, such as the universal and the existential determiners. (These determiners all present the explicit subject monotonicity); the other is the fuzzy determiners, such as many, most and so on. The fuzzy determiners can again be further divided in to three types and among these three, the subject monotonicity of the first two are of under-determined.Aiming to achiever our goal in this thesis, we just turn to several traditional theories during the whole process of investigation. For the non-fuzzy determiners, we just connect our study with the traditional square of opposition and Venn Diagram; and during the study of the fuzzy determiners, we just improved the scale function in the Fuzzy Set Theory in order for it to be able to properly denote the uncertainty of the subject monotonicity.Through observation, we found that although the subject monotonicity of the determiner will not be as systematic as the predicate monotonicity, we can also pursuit the semantic universals underlying it. We assume that the subject monotonicity can be derived out just based on their determiners'semantic denotations just as their predicate monotonicity.The determiners in the Mandarin Chinese are complex than those in English. However, based on our observation, we could notice that just on the monotonicity, the determiners in both languages behave the same.When it come to the conclusion, we argue that for natural language determiners, their subject monotonicity, the same as the predicate ones, can be derived out just according to some key semantic constituents.