Polarity Sensitivity Of "dou" In Comparative Construction "A Bi B Dou W"

Polarity sensitivity is very common in natural languages.There are polarity items or other ways to express polarity.“Dou” in Chinese is regarded to be related with polarity sensitivity when it appears in the construction “lian...dou”,which could construct the polarity meaning of common nouns.Yet,studies about the Chinese “A bi B dou W” have not been done from the polarity sensitivity point of view.From the perspective of polarity sensitivity,based on the polarity sensitivity theory,scalar model theory and Chen Liping' s(2012)analysis of “dou” as a distributive operator and scalar operator,this thesis makes an exploration to the polarity sensitivity of “dou” in the comparative structure “A bi B dou W”.According to the different properties of the compared item B,this thesis divides “A bi B dou W” into three kinds and get the conclusion that “dou” has the polarity sensitivity only when B is a common noun without polarity meaning,while in other two kinds “dou” dose not have polarity sensitivity,that is,when B is an interrogative pronoun or a common noun which has polarity meaning itself.Besides,this thesis conducts three tests to provide evidences for the presupposition of “dou”.