Semantic Study Of Chinese Free Choice Item ‘renhe'

Since 1967, when the concept of free choice was born, the researches on free choice items done by scholars at home and abroad have come out one after another.These studies mainly focus on the discussion about the following aspects related to the English FCIs(eg.any,wh-ever), such as, lexical semantics, licensing conditions and quantificational force.Till now, the studies of English FCIs have been comprehensive, on contrary, investigations on Chinese FCIs are relatively poor. Besides, there is no clear classification on such kind of items. The relative researches on the Chinese renhe which contains the characteristics of free choice mostly focused on two perspectives: licensing conditions and the semantic properties of its co-occurrence word dou. As for the semantic properties of the special FCI renhe, there is actually no systematic and comprehensive investigation and without clear definition.In this thesis, the semantic properties of renhe will be analyzed in the framework of formal semantics, and the approaches Veneeta Dayal used in the study of any,the English equivalent of renhe, will be applied into the study of the Chinese renhe and the comparison between them will be discussed. The aspects such as subtrigged contexts, modal contexts, contextual vagueness and the cause of universal quantificational force will be involved to have a full investigation of the distributional properties and semantic features of FCI renhe.After the discussion, this thesis reaches the following conclusions:(1) Renhe has the wide scope reading;(2) Renhe…dou has the universal interpretation, its quantificational force comes from the quantificational operator dou;(3) This thesis argues that any is a universal, wh-ever is a definite, therefore, renhe differs from both English FCI any and wh-ever.