Multi-dimensional Study On The Negative Polarity Function Of "renhe"

While teaching Chinese as a foreign language, Chinese teachers can easily find many errorswhich refer to the mixed uses of the limitation words between “Renhe” and “Shenme”,“Mei”,“Suoyou”. Until now, we have not seen any research specifically targeted on the usage of“Renhe”. Among the existing studies, part of them appear in dictionaries and part of them appearin papers in comparison with other similar words.This paper focuses on the negative polarity function of “Renhe”, analyzing its function in thesemantic features, the sentence-level granted conditions, the pragmatic-level manifestations anddiscussing the methods of teaching “Renhe” to the foreign students.At the semantic level, the article chooses a comparative analysis between “Renhe” and“mei”, elaborating that “Renhe”, in the negative context, achieves the overall denial through thedenial of the minimum.At the sentence level, through closed-end real corpus analysis, we realize that "Renhe"generally appears only in a negative context. The licensing conditions include dominant negativestructure and implicit negative structure which includes non-facts antisense predicate sensitivefocus operator,co-occurrence with the specific adverbs that could be exclusively applied innegative structure, the application in the hypothetical proposition and in the context of possiblemodal.At pragmatic level,“Renhe” has the typical characteristics of the pragmatic function, whichalso characterize co-occurrence with focus-sensitive operator “Dou”/“Ye”. Accordingly, thepolarity of the word "Renhe" determines the available structure which mainly distributes in thestatement domain, that concerns declaration, provisions, instructions, willingness introductiondomain; but does not appear in cognition domain or action domain. This echoes the negative poleof the righteous and any structure.When it comes to teaching Chinese as a foreign language, it should be focused onunderstanding its core semantics, as well as the combination with interpretations in the textcontext. Furthermore, the clear instruction on its granted conditions could be helpful for thestudent to learn more about co-occurrence of “Renhe” with some adverbs.