A Research On Chinese Donkey Sentences Based On The Framework Of DRT

Since Peter Geach(1962) put forward the original donkey sentence "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.", this linguistic problem has become an important research object in the fields of logic and linguistics. As to those problems involved in donkey sentence, researchers from different fields have given formal and informal explanations about it from different aspects. They also developed relative formal semantic theories in order to solve this problem. We could say that researches on donkey sentence have speeded the research of dynamic semantics since80th of last century.Because those researches on donkey sentences have promoted the development of the semantic research which is mainly about English, scholars begin to discuss Chinese donkey sentences from those years. They also made a lot of researches on types or patterns of manifestation of Chinese donkey sentences. On such a background, we try to analyze Chinese donkey sentences by Discourse Representation Theory (DRT for short) which could process English donkey sentences. There are some key steps about this work:First, we have to know the basic thought and framework of DRT which could be used to analyze English donkey sentences; second, we have to summarize domestic researches on Chinese donkey sentences’classifications and give typical forms of Chinese donkey sentences based on the fundamental characters of English donkey sentences; third, based on DRT’s framework, we try to add something new ideas to the syntax and semantics of DRT for the researches about Chinese donkey sentences. This modification will make DRT be a correlative theory to Chinese donkey sentences which we could use DRTc to represent it. Finally we could try to solve Chinese donkey sentences and give their explanations on DRTc.The main creativity of this dissertation lies in some aspects as follow:first, we have summarized those domestic researches on Chinese donkey sentences, and distinguished several typical forms of Chinese donkey sentences; second, we try to make some modifications for DRT’s framework. We make it contain syntax and semantic contents associated with Chinese donkey sentences and give processions and explanations of those kinds of Chinese donkey sentences on the frame of adjusted DRTc; furthermore, in the consideration of the function of bearing information of natural language and those factors affecting its semantics, we try to give a definite explanation of a sentence in the process of information exchanges and try to expand DRT’s model. We put the background knowledge of the two sides of information exchanging in one model, which makes the definite explanation of a sentence is relative, that is to say on different background knowledge of exchanging, the semantics of a sentence could be different, so that will better reflect function of circulating and conveying of sentences as information bearers.