The Study Of The Monotonicity Property Of Quantihers In Mandarin Chinese

Monotonicity property of quantifiers in natural languages has something to do with what happens when we increase or decrease the size of the members in the set denoted by NPs or VPs. Monotonicity, closely related to generalized quantifiers, is an important research subject in formal semantics.The study of monotonicity property from the perspective of logic semantics has been developed in the past thirty years. While international semantic circles are rich in the theoretical results of monotonicity research, the work discussed by virtue of data in Mandarin Chinese is almost lacking.Within the framework of Generalized Quantifier Theory put forward by Barwise&Cooper (1981), this thesis attempts to study both the subject and the predicate monotonicity properties of determiner quantifiers by virtue of set talk and Truth-conditional Semantics. Three research questions are raised. First, what are the monotonicity properties of quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese? Second, according to the monotonicity properties of quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese, are there any semantic universals lying in quantifiers from the perspective of monotonicity? If yes, what are they? Third, apart from monotonicity universals, there are supposed to be monotonicity differences between the quantifiers in English and the corresponding ones in Mandarin Chinese. What are the differences between the monotonicity of quantifiers in English and that in Mandarin Chinese? How can these differences get reasonable explanation?As for the first question, we first give a detailed description of corresponding quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese in aspects of syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation, and then applies monotonicity to analyzing some linguistic phenomena in Mandarin Chinese, aiming at illustrating the monotonicity property of some Chinese universal quantifiers, existential quantifiers, and fuzzy quantifiers, and trying to display the results in tables. As for the second question, by studying the monotonicity patterns, we observe some semantic universals, such as the generalization that all existential quantifiers are subject monotone increasing. Their predicates in positive situation are monotone increasing while in negative situation are monotone decreasing. As for the last question, we discuss the differences of quantifiers in English and the corresponding ones in Mandarin Chinese. The result is that some quantifiers in English can not find their corresponding ones in Mandarin Chinese, such as no. And other quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese, though having the same monotonicity property with those corresponding ones in English, exist in more complex forms. All of these may be attribute to the fast that Mandarin Chinese is a highly analytic language. By the study of the monotonicity properties of quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese, we gain some semantic universals and differences from the perspective of monotonicity, thus deepening the previous research. Meanwhile, theoretically, quantifiers can’t be listed exhaustively and the quantifiers we discussed are typical in Mandarin Chinese, which result in some limitations of the present thesis. We expect further study to work deep into the reasoning and formalization of natural languages.