A Philosophical And Linguistic Analysis On Propositional Attitude Predicate "Xiang"

The propositional attitude verbs,such as think,believe,doubt,desire,are often used to express one's attitude towards a proposition.They indicate the propositional attitude that an agent holds towards the propositional attitude content.Propositional attitude has drawn a great deal of attention of scholars in philosophy of language and linguistics.It serves as a principal tool to bridge the gap between thought within one's own breast and the outer world.In recent years,more and more researchers have begun to analyze propositional attitude in semantics and pragmatics,and it has become the subject of intensive investigation.However,little research has been done from the perspective of pure cognitive sense,and even less research has been done on propositional attitude verbs in Chinese.Although it has been taken for granted that phrases like woxiang ‘I think' is a kind of discourse markers or parentheses,I still argue that in some circumstances woxiang ‘I think' enjoys some properties that do not belong to discourse markers,and should be classified as propositional attitude report,which will be discussed in detail later in this thesis.Therefore,the rationale of this study is that it will focus on propositional attitude predicate xiang ‘think' in Chinese,to explore what kinds of propositional attitude it can express,and if it can express different propositional attitude then attempt to find out its syntactic and semantic properties.To achieve this goal,this thesis will first define propositional attitude predicate and delimit some expression that are usually included in the domain to make the scope of the study more focused.The thesis then makes a distinction between occurrent thought and belief.Finally,the thesis presents a typology of propositional attitude predicate xiang ‘think',describing in a detailed fashion the syntactic and semantic properties of thought and belief.The thesis concludes by presenting that xiang ‘think' can express occurrent thought as well as dispositional belief,and as a propositional attitude verb xiang‘think' enjoys its unique semantic and syntactic properties.