Capturing Mandarin Attributives: A Semantics

There is a range of semantic relationship between attributives and nouns among Mandarin noun phrasal structures. The semantic relationship between them in many cases is not amenable to an account in terms of conjunction. This thesis explores attributive semantics in Mandarin Chinese, attempts to sort out attributives based on this, and aims at establishing a semantics to it.This thesis centers on thematic relation between attributives and the heads among Mandarin noun phrasal structure, attempting to contribute an interpretation of a linguistic fact that most of adjectives and nouns, can both precede the noun head as attributives and occur at the end of the sentence as predicates on the condition that the noun head turns to be subject with meaning unchanged, while some only function as attributives but not predicates or while they perform as predicates, the meaning is altered. Concretely speaking, this exploration mainly consists of (1) syntax of AN (attributives + noun); (2) interaction between adjectives and noun heads; (3) interaction between noun attributives and noun heads; (4) a taxonomy of mandarin attributives.This thesis applies intensional semantics, and the relevant theories including conception of type, set, possible world,λabstraction andλdeduction, Montague's Model Theory, etc., and proves that some attributives (intersective) are interpreted extensionally, and some (nonintersective) intensionally, and that the attributives which are used intensionally cannot turn to be used predicatively on the condition that the noun head occurs at the beginning of the sentence as the subject.The main innovating point in this thesis is that the author does away the traditional thinking model of classifying based on the complicated semantic or pragmatic relation, focuses on the three possible circumstances of the relation between the set of attributives denotation ([A]) and that of noun denotation ([N]), i.e. the possible result of their intersect, and divides mandarin attributives into three classes: the intersective, the privative, and the qualitative.