Polarity Sensitivity Of Chinese Indefinite Wh-words

As a natural linguistic phenomenon, polarity sensitivity refers to the phenomenon that some expressions have the tendency of occurring only in the affirmative propositions or negative propositions. These expressions are called Polarity Items (PIs), which can be divided into Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) according to their different polarity distributions. During the last fifty years, linguists have paid great attention on PIs as well as polarity sensitivity, thus the theoretical outcome, from various aspects like syntax, semantics and pragmatics, is tremendous and significant. However, the studies are mainly based on the foreign linguistic data such as English, Greek and Dutch. Comparatively, the studies on Mandarin Chinese are far less. In spite of the fact that many Chinese linguists have made great achievements on observing and studying Chinese NPIs, few has done the researches from the perspective of polarity sensitivity.This thesis follows the variation theory on NPIs proposed by Zwarts(1995,1998), van der Wouden (1994,1997) and Giannakidou(1998,2002), and bases its studies on Chinese indefinite wh-words, focusing on the following three questions:1) What are the semantic properties of Chinese indefinite wh-words? 2) What's the licensing conditions of Chinese indefinite wh-words? And what type of NPIs should Chinese indefinite wh-words belong to based on these conditions? 3) Why do Chinese indefinite wh-words need such licensing conditions? What are the inner motives?To answer these questions, firstly, this thesis gives a comprehensive description of the licensing conditions of Chinese indefinite wh-words on the basis of former studies. Via analyzing all the conditions, it finds out that Chinese indefinite wh-words can only appear in the nonveridical contexts, thus being labeled as the super weak NPIs. As for its inner motives, the thesis believes that Chinese indefinite wh-words have its own lexical deficiency in that they cannot introduce a variable like common indefinites which can perform the process of existence closure. Contrarily, indefinite wh-words can only introduce a'dependent variable' which cannot refer to a context referent object in the real world. Therefore, the conclusion has come out that Chinese indefinite wh-words have lexical deficiency themselves, namely the referential deficiency, which makes indefinite wh-words can only be licensed in nonveridical contexts in that this kind of contexts do not necessarily need an exact referent.