On Quantification In Negation Of Wh-word Shenme In Mandarin

Shenme is a typical WH-word in Mandarin,and it can appear both in interrogative sentences and non-interrogative sentences.Many scholars have investigated it from aspects of syntax,semantics,pragmatics,and so on.However,a specialized and in-depth research on its semantics in negative scope is rare.This paper chooses shenme as the object of study and gives a investigation on its semantics in negative scope.Methodology:Base on domestic research on Wh-words in Mandarin with approaches in Chinese lexics and philology,I utilize others work from foreign scholars' cross-linguistics and formal research on Wh-words.Formal semantics is the main theory I take in this paper,and corpus linguistic research provides useful data to support it.Base on the description in details,a in-depth analysis is given.Roadmap:Section 1 states the main issue which I will investigate in this paper,and gives the main structures this paper:a structure with ambiguous meaning "mei/bu+VP+shenme+NP",and the structure "shenme+NP+dou/ye+bu/mei+VP" which dou or ye appears in.Section 2 is a review of previous literature.A summary of domestic and foreign research on Wh-words is a requisition which is needed to establish the foundation that the following research could be built on.In Section 3,I analyze the limitation of current domestic explanation on Wh-words,including "renzhi","xuzhi", and point out the fatal bug of those explanation.After abondoning the traditional explanation on Wh-words,I give a new angle-quantification in negation,from which we can explore the meaning of shenme in formal method.The core of my angle is that Wh-words have an intensional quantification implication no matter what their extensional meanings are in particular context.Actually,that relation is like the relation of de re and de dicto.In section 4,I focus on the structure "mei/bu+VP+shenme+NP" and explain its semantic mechanism.The main claim is that the partial negative meaning of this structure is not direct from negation on Wh-word shenme,but from an asymmetry of negation.In that procedure,the semantics of shenme is similar with that of NPIs.Besides,I give the semantic property of NPIs for a clear illustration.Section 5 explains the universal negation meaning of structure "mei/bu+VP+shenme NP",and possible world theory and some modal logic theory are introduced.Following the line of formal section,Section 6 discusses the meaning of adv dou/ye,and research its influence on the meaning of structure "shenme+NP+dou/ye+bu/mei+ VP".In Section 7, I make a conclusion and give further discussion about other Wh-words in Mandarin.Contribution of this paper:1 The idea of quantification in negation scope would revise the comprehension on Wh-words in mandarin in theoretical linguistics.2 The view of this paper provides a theoretical support for relative fields including Chinese information processing,automatic translation,machine learning,search engine.3 The indication on intensional meaning of shenme would help in some fields in teaching Chinese as a second language.4 The further research in typological linguistic could take advantage of the claim in this paper.