The Formal Semantic Study On Mandarin Chinese-Men

Mandarin Chinese-men has always been the discussion focus of scholars.-Men can not exist alone,and it mainly appears in the following three structures.The first one is located behind common nouns such as“haizi-men(???)”.The second one is behind personal pronouns such as,“ni-men”(??).The last kind is in the back of proper nouns,such as,“leifeng-men(???)”.-Men in the phrases of“common nouns+men”expresses vague plurality,which is different from that in other phrases such as“proper nouns+men”and“pronouns+men”.This paper mainly focus on the interpretation of-men in the phrases of“common nouns+men”.Generally,-men followed behind common nouns is regarded as a plural marker,like“s”in English.But according to Chierchia's(1998a)Nominal Mapping Parameter,the language with rich classifiers lacks plural marker.If-men is plural marker,why is“san haizi-men(????)”ungrammatical?Why is“san ge haizi(????)”reasonable?Thus,-men has relationship with numerals.The previous studies on-men can be divided into two categories: one is the traditional studies,which mainly discuss the diachronic meaning of-men,the syntactic position of-men,as well as the property of-men,and most of scholars conduct their studies on-men from the traditional perspective,laying emphasis on the relationship between-men and plural marker aw well as the relationship between-men and definiteness.The other is the formal semantic studies,which relate to the semantic type of-men.Only Takeo Kurafuji(2004)and Li Julie Jiang(2018)have made detailed analysis on-men from the perspective of formal semantics.Both of them treats-men as a plural marker,but which is a change to Chierchia's theory that the language with rich classifiers lacks plural marker.Besides,there are some problems needed to be further discussed when they deal with the relationship between-men and classifiers.This thesis tries to join their discussion to make a further study on the semantic meaning of-men.Based on the generalized quantifier theory,-men is regarded as a restricted quantifier without definiteness to express vague plurality,like “some” or “all” in English,which not only can maintain Chierchia's(1998a)Nominal Mapping Parameter that Chinese bare nouns are kind-denoting,achieve a cross-language research,but also offer a better explanation of the relationship between plurality and classifiers.