The Adverbial Presupposition Trigger Hai In Mandarin

Chinese adverbs have long been the focus of linguistics.With their extensive meanings and wide range of uses,Chinese adverbs have a special status among lexical categories,often carrying on complex grammar functions.This thesis focuses on the usages and semantic interpretations of adverb hai in Mandarin.Hai,as the adverbial presupposition trigger,its various interpretations pose a challenge to the understanding of its semantic mechanism.In this thesis,we aim to give a unified account for the various interpretations of hai from the perspective of presuppoisitonal analysis,and derive the presupposition triggered compositionally in a combinat ion of aspectual characters or features in Mandarin sentences.The following questions are to be addressed:(1)Since hai contains wide range of meanings,how to sort them out reasonably to better understand hai?(2)Can a unified mechanism be explored to explain the various interpretations of hai? Is the core meaning of hai available as well as other discourse-related meanings?(3)As an adverbial presuppositional trigger,how the presuppositions triggered by hai can be compositionally derived?This thesis gives a detailed analysis of hai in its temporal use,additive use,marginal use and comparative use,arguing that marginal use is a subclass of comparative use.The second question is the focus of the Chapter three,the presupposition triggered by the adverbial trigger hai has a significant role in predicting and explaining the various semantic interpretations.The content of presuppositions is dependent on an anaphoric element,which is a set of contextually determined covert variables in the scope of the particle hai.Specifically,there are three types of covert variables including time variables,event variables and degree variables,all of which are closely interacted with four meanings of hai: In the temporal interpretation,the anaphoric element on which a presupposition is dependent on is a covert time variable under the scope of hai in the sentence;In the additive interpretation,the corresponding anaphoric element is an event variable;In the comparative and marginal interpretations,both their anaphoric elements in the sentence are an degree variable.How these variables interact with their asserted sentence is what a presupposition is specifically about.Discussions on the ?Additivity? as the core meaning of hai,and on other usages of hai related to expectation are also elaborated in the Chapter three.The last Chapter answers tentatively the third question,in which a formal analysis of presupposition is provided by means of combining Ippolito‘s(2007)semantic analysis on English still and aspectual markers in Mandarin.The issue that presupposition is a semantic notion or a pragmatic one has long been disputed.This thesis explores a consistent way to describe hai within the computation of presuppositions,while deriving the presuppositions of hai within the truth-condition semantics.In this sense,this thesis echoes the view hold by many such as Asher & Lascarides(1998)that the presupposition is a combination of semantic and pragmatic notions,any presupposition analysis should not be completed semantically or pragmatically alone.