The Interaction Of Modality And Negation In Chinese

From the perspective of functionalism,this dissertation studies the interaction between modality and negation in Chinese languages.The main ideas of this thesis are showed below.First,it comprehensively investigates the semantic intensity of modality so as to define the epistemic and deontic modality.Based on the previous achievements,it initially proposes systematic methods to determine the semantic intensity of modal verbs.Second,through the respective investigation on negative words and modal words,it studies four types of expressive forms of the negation of modality in Mandarin Chinese as well as some Chinese dialects and other languages.Third,it finds that the semantic intensity of modal verbs is closely related to its polarity in Chinese language,which could be distinguishingly explained by the affirmative and negative axioms in natural language.Moreover,the causes of exceptions beyond the axioms could be reasonably explained as well.Fourth,there are phenomena of polysemy between the subcategories of modality,which are mostly related to negation.[Unnecessary]and[Forbidden]both pertain to the subcategories of deontic modality.The cases that are possessed with identical forms but two meanings of modality in Chinese and other languages could be considered as a result of diachronically semantic change from[Unnecessary]to[Forbidden].Meanwhile,this dissertation indicates that such kind of mechanism results from the application of Relevance Maxim within Politeness Principle.Fifth,within the category of epistemic modality,[Unlikely]and[Possible]are interlinked in certain conditions.On the basis of this fact,the dissertation proposes that this interlink result from the fact that the maxim of quantity infers the same conventional implicature through Quantity Principle,which is possible but not necessary.Lastly,in many languages and dialects,the verbs signifying[courage]is usually provided with the semantic meaning of deontic modality,which represents the phenomenon of polysemy between dynamic modality and deontic modality.Furthermore,the implicational universal,abstracted from the syntactic distribution of verbs with the meaning of[courage]that denote deontic modality,could be described as negative>interrogative>confirmative.Based on the analysis above-mentioned,negation plays a very important role in the polysemy of dual or multiple modality categories and the process of semantic change.