A Formal Semantic Approach To Mandarin Aspectual Particle Hai

This work presents an absolutely semantic approach that attempts to construct the architecture and explain the derivations of mandarin aspectual particle hai. Framed in Krifka's classification of focus operators, this work mainly focuses on the following questions:(1) What is the presupposition of aspectual hai-bearing sentences? (2) How the presupposition of aspectual hai-bearing sentences can be compositionally derived? (3)Where does the "continuity" reading in aspectual hai-bearing sentences come from? (4) How does hai differ from such adverbs of quantification as changchang and zongshi?Following Ippolito (2007), we argue that similar to its English counterpart still, aspectual hai is an additive operator which presupposes that the T-SIT of an eventuality (a contextually salient event) overlaps a past time and asserts that the T-SIT of an eventuality (a contextually salient event) also overlaps the speech time. We propose three characteristics of aspectual hai in reference to Ipplito's point of view:1) The presupposed part of hai is a proposition which indicates that the T-SIT of an eventuality (a contextually salient event) includes a past time, whereas the assertive part of hai is that the T-SIT of eventuality encoded by the predication P overlaps the speech time; 2) Similar to English aspectual still, hai takes three variables:a covert time variable (type i), a covert eventuality variable (type l) and the prediction P, denotation of the AspP (type<l<it>>). Hence, the semantic type of hai is <i<l<<it>>t>>>;3) In addition, hai imposes a partiality condition on P that there is a time t'before the topic time for which the contextually salient eventuality holds true. If the presupposition is defined, then the eventuality indicated by the predication holds true at the topic time.Different from still which guarantees that the same eventuality occurs in both the presupposed and assertive part, whether the two eventualities in the presupposition and assertion refer to the same eventuality is concerned with the situation type of the predication. The continuous meaning comes into being when the aspectual hai cooccurs with atelic verbs and the two eventualities expressed by the presupposed and assertive part mingle into one single event. However, the continuous meaning vanishes when hai associates with telic verbs.Based on the above analysis, this thesis made a comparison between hai and adverbs of changchang and zongshi. On one hand, hai can co-occur with aspectual operators le and guo, while changchang and zongshi cannot. On the other hand, hai can situate ahead of A-bu-A Q-operators, whose occurrence will not prohibit A-bu-A Q-operators from taking wide scope. We assume that these divergence are dependent on the fact that hai is, in essence, an additive operator.