Type-Logical Grammar And Shi And De In Mandarin Chinese

The syntax and semantics of shi and de are a long cherished topic in Chinese linguistics.Two perplexing questions rivet the researchers' attention. First,what are their parts of speech? Is shi a verb,an adverb,or a functional particle to mark a focus? How many shi's are there in the Chinese? And how many de's are there? All the above amount to asking:Is there a syntactically/semantically identical shi or de? The phonological identity of shi and de predicts heated debates on their syntactic and semantic identity.The second puzzle is about the syntactic generation and semantic interpretation of shi and de.Transformationalists concern themselves more about their syntactic generation while logical semanticists are concerned more about their interpretation.Yet the two issues are so closely connected to one another that the study of shi and de will suffer if we pay a disproportionate attention to either one of them while neglecting the other.Much is left to be investigated about their syntax,semantics,and pragmatics in an integrated way.This paper is just an endeavor in this direction.Researches conducted with the type-logical grammar are a frontier area in the syntactically and semantically integrated study of natural languages.In its broad sense,a type-logical grammar refers to a framework which interlinks a categorial grammar and a type-logical semantics.In its narrow sense,it refers specifically to the linking of Lambek calculus,a categorial grammar with a specific generative power,and a type-logical grammar.Montague grammar can be taken as the first full-fledged type-logical grammar and is acclaimed as another linguistic revolution since the transformational-generative grammar.It is a metalanguage intended to handle both natural languages and artificial languages.The breakthrough it represents is that for the first time in linguistic history,syntax and semantics are fused together with mathematical rigor and elegance.One of its backbone ideas is that a language consists of two algebras: a syntactic algebra,which generates all the well-defined expressions,and a semantic algebra,which is simply a fully interpreted logical system.The syntactic algebra is homomorphic to the semantic algebra.The categorial grammar in the Montague grammar has the same generative power as the classical AB categorial grammar,which has been proved to be inadequate for natural languages syntax.Lambek calculus is much more powerful than AB categorial grammar with such operations on categories as functional application,category association,functional composition,category shifting,and category division.Categorial grammars are best known for their simple yet powerful generative mechanism which works only with a category system,defined as a recursion,and several operations.The category system has a direct correspondence with the semantic types in type-logical semantics and there is a many-to-one relation between the two sets.Each expression of a certain category in the syntactic algebra is assigned a semantic entity of a certain type in the semantic algebra through the translation algebra.Each well-defined semantic entity is interpreted as a set of truth conditions by the semantics of the logical system,which in turn can be verified or falsified with reference to a particular model.In light of the three criteria proposed in Dowty(2007) about value judgments of different theories:compositional transparency,syntactic economy,and structural semantic economy,we come to the natural conclusion that the type-logical grammar is a handy tool to conduct a serious linguistic investigation.This paper applies the type-logical grammar into the intended integrated study of shi and de.On the one hand,it tackles the problems of syntactically generating and semantically interpreting shi and,on the other,it tries to generate and interpret de as appearing in the so-called modifier-head structure and in de phrases(such as xinxian de,literally "fresh",and jiaoshu de,"those who teach"), de used as a modal particle,and de as a past tense or perfect aspect operator. The paper argues that though the syntactic and semantic identity of shi cannot be maintained,its phonological identity is echoed by its pragrnatics:it is an explicit operator of assertion and by "explicit" we mean shi is a morphological representation of the assertion operator.The identity of de(at least those uses within the range of this research) is,however,observed from the syntactic and semantic perspectives.Semantically,de is an operator which turns the expression it operates on into a one-place predicate,which does not accord with the widely-held belief that de is a nominaliser.De is the morpho-syntactic realization of this operator.The paper consists of six chapters.Chapter 1:An introduction.This chapter provides a review of studies centered around shi and de before pinning down the questions it intends to solve. It also includes an introduction to the analysis tool the present study employs. Chapter 2:The syntax and semantics of shi.This chapter starts with a critical review of several important and influential studies about shi.Then it articulates the guiding ideas of this research with reference to the study about the English verb be.Finally it answers the questions of generating and interpreting,both semantically and pragmatically,shi sentences.Based on its syntactic features,this paper proposes that shi is an expression of multiple categories:vp/n,vp/vp,vp/np,and s/s.Semantically,shi of categories vp/n,vp/vp,and s/s is an identity function while shi of category vp/np is a morpho-syntactie realization of a two-place predicate variable. Pragmatically,shi is an explicit operator of assertion whose scope is relative to such other operators as focus.This chapter also suggests a plan for a detailed and in-depth study of serial verb constructions in Chinese,which is believed to be more simple and straightforward than the other studies ever made so far.Chapter 3:De as a derivational element.Starting from the discussion of how to distinguish free morphemes from bound morphemes,this chapter argues for the dichotomy of de between a derivational element(de_L) and a syntactic one (de_S).Adjectives ending with de_L are named reduplicated adjectives(RA for short).This chapter analyzes de₁,de₂,and de₃ as proposed in朱德熙(1961/1980) with the new tool of type-logical grammar and discusses the syntactic generation and semantic interpretation of RAs.With inspirations from context-free semantics,Chapter 3 also puts forward the Principle of Semantic Accessibility and provides a formal definition of "semantic orientation" based on the proposed principle.Chapter 4:De_S as a combination unit of syntax and semantics.By revealing the defects and problems in some influential formal semantics literature on de, this chapter argues that de is not a nominaliser as commonly believed;instead,it is a predicationaliser which changes the expression it operates on into a one-place predicate.The chapter also argues that adjectives and partition words are expressions of category n/n if we recast the criteria for the differentiation of compound words from sentence structures with the type-logical grammar.Chapter 5:The syntax and semantics of de_S.This chapter demonstrates the identity of de_S in two aspects.Semantically,des is an operator which turns the expression it operates on into a one-place predicate and syntactically,it is a morpho-syntactic realization of this operator.Different semantic effects result after the application of de_S.To expressions of category vp,de_S applies as the function of INSTANTIATOR,which is an identity function mathematically.The semantics of category n is very complicated and Chapter 5 only discusses the effect of de_S on nominal expressions of substance such as mutou("wood") and shuijing("crystal"). Logic of plurals and mass terms formulated in Link(1983) is put into use at this juncture.It is shown that the semantic effect of de_S on a nominal expression of substance in Chinese amounts to a partition on the equivalence classes introduced by the relation of material equivalence.The semantic effect of de_S on categories of n/n and np is also discussed.Chapter 5 testifies to the plausibility of the analysis so far proposed through generating and interpreting the five types of judgment sentences discussed in朱德熙(1978/1980) and sentences with a preposed de(that is,sentences in which de moves away from its usual place at the end of a "verb+object" structure and reappears before the object).It also maintains that there is no shi...de construction in Chinese and the concerned sentences can be generated and fully interpreted by taking shi and de as two separate units of syntactic and semantic combination.Chapter 6:An afterthought and the conclusion.Besides expressions of category vp,the predicative.element in "predicative element+de" can also be an expression of category tv(=n\s),dtv(=(vp/n)/n=((n\s)/n)/n),or s.Though "tv+de","dtv+de",and "s+de" expressions could be handled with the syntax and semantics of de as analyzed in Chapter 5,stronger calculability is still to be desired.Chapter 6 points out that event semantics may provide a solution.It is proposed that the semantic value of de in "predicative element + de" is consistent,which is to pick up any one argument other than the event argument or the state argument within the event structure or state structure of a sentence. This picked-up argument forms some kind of two-place relation with the event argument or the state argument.The ambiguity of some "tv/ dtv +de" expressions is a matter of pragmatics rather than semantics.The syntactic value of de is to materialize the argument picked up by de,that is,to give the argument a morpho-syntaetic representation.Chapter 6 finally concludes the paper.