| Polarity sensitivity usually refers to the linguistic expressions that are restricted to some linguistic environments for acceptability. The main purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the fine structure of negative polarity items in Chinese in the semantic framework. Three questions are discussed: the licensor question, the licensee question, and the licensing relation question. Chapter 2 shows the distribution of various types of negative polarity items in Chinese and English, such as indefinite wh-phrases, any, renhe ‘any’, and minimizers. In Chapter 3, I argue that negative polarity items in Chinese are not homogeneous and the classes of licensors for these four types of negative polarity items correspond to the hierarchy of negativity in the sense of Zwarts (1998) and Giannakidou (1998): nonveridical operators, downward-entailing operators, anti-additive operators, and antimorphic operators. Chapter 4 is devoted to accounting for the issue of why these four types of negative polarity items are restricted to these four kinds of contexts on the basis of alternative semantics in Rooth (1992, 1996). Chapter 5 discusses the licensing relation between licensors and licensees. Two issues are addressed: the subject-object asymmetry and blocking effects. First, I argue that these two issues can be explained on the basis of function-argument relation, if the distinction between the sentential negation bu shi ‘it is not the case that,’ which is of type <t,t>, and the predicate negation bu ‘not’ and mei ‘not’, which are of type <<e,t>,<e,t>>, is recognized, and different types of noun phrases are distinguished, that is, strong quantifier phrases, dou ‘all’-related noun phrases, are of type <<e,t>,t>, and general proper names and pronouns are of type <e>. Moreover, I argue that the licensing domain for negative polarity items must be defined locally, instead of globally, in contrast to Ladusaw (1979). Negative polarity items must be licensed in the least minimal licensing domain. The compatibility in meaning and the proper relation between the licensor and the licensee are called the fine structure of polarity licensing. |
