A Contrastive Study Of Negative Polarity Item Between Korean ’A-MU’ And Chinese ’renhe’

The Phenomenon that some expressions(either words or idiomatie Ph rases) withlimited distribution, occur in negative context exists in both Korean and Chinese. This kind of expressions called Negative Pol arity Item(NPI) in this Paper. Both in Korean and Chinese, NPIs belong to various syntactic categories, but are still controlled by the sam e laws. NPIs in different language have its own features in semantic and syntactic. The paper primarily concerns with the syntax and seman tics of typical NPI’A-MU’in Korean and’RENHE’in Chinese includ ing their semantic properties、syntactic construction and distributio nal properties and the similarities and differences between the two.At the semantic level, First, this paper analyses the indicate an d quantificational feature of Korean NPI’A-MU’and Chinese NPI’RE NHE’. Then, we find that Korean NPI’A-MU’and Chinese NPI’RENHE’ both have the non-finite feature and unspcific features, but NPI’A-MU’and NPI’RENHE’shows different behaviors in terms of quantific ational force,’A-MU’is universal quantifier which achieves the ove rall denial in the negative contest, while’RENHE’is not only exist ential quantifier but also universal quantifier. When ’RENHE’is a universal quantifier, it achieves the sectional denial in the negativ e contest.At the syntactic level, through real corpus analysis, we realize that’A-MU’and’RENHE’can not be used alone in the sentence and should be used in the forms of’A-MU+NP+DAO’ or ’RENHE+NP’syntacti c structure which undertake the syntax function of subject, object an d adverbial. Then we find that’A-MU’and’RENHE’not only appears in a negative contest but also appears in a few un-negated contest in cluding ’if-clause’、’before-clause’ and ’The disjunctive question’.’A-MU’ and ’RENHE’ both can appear in a negative context. But’A- MU ’only can appear in’before clause’ while ’RENHE’ can appear i n ’if-clause’, ’before clause’,’The disjunctive question’un-n egated context.The comparative study of NPI’A-MU’ in Korean and NPI ’RENHE’ i n Chinese reveals internal mechanism of Negative Polarity sensitivity in Korean and Chinese, thus help to uncover how universial Grammar wo rks cross linguistically.