A Specificity Account Of (in) Completeness Effect In Mandarin Chinese

Incompleteness effect in Mandarin Chinese is observed in a cluster of sentences that are grammatically well-formed and propositionally unproblematic but still lack the ability to stand alone as independent utterances with a declarative mood.The research in this regard mainly falls into two types: first,the classification of the sentence-completing elements and the description of them on the basis of the classification,and second,the constraints on sentence-completeness.The topic why the use of sentence-completing elements can attain to the completeness effect has been previously analyzed by scholars from many perspectives,and various theories thereof have been formulated: Boundedness Theory,Information Adequacy Theory,Generalized Anchoring Principle,Referentiality Licensing Theory and Grounding Theory,among others.However,each of these theories is limited in some way,leaving some data unaccounted for.A unified explanation for the incompleteness effect is therefore desirable.In this thesis,we attempt to address sentence-completeness in Mandarin Chinese from the perspective of specificity,drawing on data from corpus.We propose classifying sentence-completing elements into general and non-general types.General sentence-completing elements can complete sentences independently.They include mood particles,modality elements,degree words and syntactic means like embedding.Non-general sentence-completing elements need to coordinate with other sentence-completing elements to make sentences self-sufficient.They include tense and aspect,quantifiers,pronouns and syntactic means like modification.Sentence-completing elements turn the incomplete sentences into complete sentences by making them satisfy the specificity condition in a proper way.Specificity is defined in this thesis as a referential property of both the object noun phrase(NP for short)and the predicate verb in a particular sentence that concerns the temporal anchoring of an individual event.It can be divided into two components: absolute specificity and relative specificity.For an object NP,absolute specificity means that the referent of the object NP is identifiable for the speaker in making the utterance,while relative specificity means that although the speaker cannot single out the referent of the object NP at speech time,yet the quantifying phrase or the adjective modifying the NP helps to restrict the referent within a certain range,thus making it easier for the speaker to identify.For a predicate verb,absolute specificity signifies that the event or state it denotes is anchored in a time axis independently,whereas relative specificity occurs mostly in coordinate and subordinate constructions,where the situation a predicate verb denotes gets anchored relative to another situation represented by another clause.Sentence-completing elements increase the specificity of the object NP or the predicate verb in a sentence,and thus enhance the event-individualness of the sentence,turning it into a complete sentence.In addition,as is supported by corpus data,predicates of different situation types tend to make different selections in sentence-completing elements in realizing self-sufficiency of sentences.The underlying reason for this is that different situation types impose different specificity restrictions on the predicate verb and the object NP of a sentence.All in all,we have developed a specificity theory for the sentence-(in)completeness effect in Mandarin Chinese.Methodologically speaking,the study conducted here has sought to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches in taking corpus data as an input to the semantic analysis.Practically speaking,the study is conductive to promoting the understanding of clauses and sentences in Mandarin Chinese.Hopefully,the conclusions drawn in this thesis can be of certain significance for teaching Chinese as a second language.