On Property Adjectives And Descriptive Adjectives In Mandarin Chinese

Ever since Zhu (1956)'s seminal research on adjectives in mandarin Chinese, many linguists have observed that there is a distinction of property adjectives like hong'red'or gao'tall'and descriptive adjectives like honghongde'red-red'or gaogaode'tall-tall'in Chinese, which differ not only in their intuitive semantic meanings but also in their syntactic distributions. According to research done by Zhu (1956) and many others, such complementary distribution can be illustrated as: a) descriptive adjectives can occur in bare predicate position but property adjectives are not allowed to, and b) property adjectives only occur in predicate positions like interrogative questions with ma, shi...de constructions, contrastive focus constructions, sentences with judgment sentential adverbials like zhenzheng 'turely', queshi'indeed', negation with bu, epistemic adjectival small clauses, conditionals as well as sentences ending with sentence le.The thesis is resolved to investigate this topic under framework of formal semantics, in particular, we shall mainly draw insights from theory on individual-level predicates and stage-level predicates advocated in Carlson (1977, 1989) & Kratzer (1995) and alternative semantics proposed in Rooth (1985,1992 & 1996).To account for such distribution, we raised the following research questions:a) What's the difference between the two sorts of adjectives? b) What's the difference between the two sorts of syntactic positions? c) What's the underlying cause for the two sorts of adjectives'complementary distribution?In response to these questions, three proposals shall be provided in this thesis. The first proposal concerns difference between property adjectives and descriptive adjectives. According to Zhu (1956,1981), Shen (1997), Paul (2005,2006), etc. property adjectives denote stable properties of intrinsic or permanent quality and descriptive adjectives denote contemporary properties with potential changeability. Holding that their intuition is roughly correct, we shall build it into general linguistic theory and suggest that the property-descriptive adjectives distinction conforms to the distinction of individual-level predicates and stage-level predicates.The second proposal concerns characteristics of different syntactic positions for the two sorts of adjectives. In particular, the proposal consists of two parts:for one thing, all positions plausible for property adjectives shall be argued to be focus positions based on their ability in evoking alternatives; for another, following Rooth (1992) and Krifka (1995)'s researches on relevant-ness requirement for alternatives, we shall argue that bare predicate position in Chinese can not be focused as no background information is offered to help evoke relevant alternatives. Therefore, the two sorts of adjectives'distributions are actually attributed in this proposal to difference in compatibility with focus position.The third proposal is the one which mediate insights in two previous proposals. In this proposal, we shall claim:a) generic sentences are invariably associated with Gn operator and require their predicates focused to provide a variable to bind; b) episodic sentences are invariably associated with a spatial-temporal variable and need to be tensed. For descriptive adjectives, since they are argued to be stage-level predicates which generally correspond to episodic sentence, their requirement of tense anchoring is accounted for. For property adjectives which, are argued to be individual-level predicates and correspond to generic sentences, their distribution can also explained as their plausible positions are focus positions which can introduce a focus variable to be bound by GN operator. Additional evidence for generic sentences'association with focus can be found in Tang & Lee (2001)'s research on generic sentences with nominal predication and Krifka's (1995) research on those with verbal predication.With the combination of the three proposals, this thesis made an attempt to account for property adjectives and descriptive adjectives'distribution, moreover, it may shed some light some relevant issues, like connection between generic sentences and focus, how a sentences may get anchored, as well as relevant requirement in constructing alternatives.