(Non)veridical Explanation On Aspectual Operators' Licensing PPIs In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis provides a preliminary study on the (non)veridical explanation with an aim to prove the following three issues:⑴the aspectual operators in Mandarin Chinese, i.e., perfect aspectual operator, experience aspectual operator, progressive aspectual operator, and short aspectual operator are veridical operators;⑵Chinese PPIs can be licensed by veridical operators;⑶PPIs and NPIs in Mandarin Chinese distribute symmetrically and are unified under (non)veridical contexts..In the past forty years, polarity sensitivity phenomenon has been approached from a variety of perspectives such as negation, downward entailing, (non)veridicality, and (non)quantification, etc. Based on the fact that most of the research focuses on NPIs and few on PPIs, less to say Chinese PPIs and their licensing conditions, we attempt to have a preliminary research on the distribution and licensing condition of Chinese PPIs in the hope of providing a partial explanation of Chinese polarity sensitivity phenomenon, especially PPIs and their licensing condition.Giannakidou (1998) considers PIs sensitive to (non)veridical operators. She proposes that sensitivity is a lexical semantic feature of PIs. She envisions sensitive expressions as expressions with a semantic deficiency, and have to be found in the (non)veridical contexts to be cured. Giannakidou (2002) proposes that PIs can be defined according to their occurring contexts, i.e., PPIs occur in the veridical contexts, while NPIs in anti-veridical contexts.Following Giannakidou (1998, 2002), this thesis aims to provide a (non)veridical explanation to distribution of PPIs in Mandarin Chinese. As an open system, PPIs consist of an unexhaustive list, so we only study Chinese PPIs from the perspective of Chinese aspectual operators. The aspectual operators discussed in this thesis, and their respective licensees, are as follows: perfect aspectual operator le licenses adverb yijing, experience aspectual operator guo licenses adverb cengjing and particle laizhe, short aspectual operator licenses verb reduplication construction, and progressive aspectual operator zhe licenses adverb zhengzai. The conclusion is that perfect aspectual operator, experience aspectual operator, progressive aspectual operator, and short aspectual operator in Mandarin Chinese are all veridical operators, and PPIs in Mandarin Chinese can be licensed by veridical operators.The (non)veridicality theory in Giannakidou (1998, 2002) is applied in Kuo (2003) for NPIs'explanation in Mandarin Chinese, which proposes that NPIs can only be licensed by nonveridical operators, in other words, NPIs in Mandarin Chinese obey the (non)veridicality condition in Giannakidou (1998, 2002).Referring to research on Chinese NPIs by Kuo (2003), we further come to the conclusion that the distribution of Chinese PIs has a close relationship with the (non)veridicality property of the contexts they occur: PPIs and NPIs can be unified under (non)veridical operators, and defined symmetrically.