A Semantic Approach To Factuality In Mandarin Chinese

The definition of factuality is usually defined in terms of the truth or falsity of the propositions expressed by sentential complements.The pioneer study goes back to Paul Kiparsky and Carol Kiparsky(1970),on the basis of syntactic differences between factive and non-factive verbs.The thesis,taking factuality as research object,tries to explore Chinese grammar category from the perspective of language and thinking.The thesis is organized from the following three questions.The first one is concerned with the definition and criteria of different factuality.The meaning of a sentence refers to a set of conditions that make it true.The truth-value can be true,false or possible,and according to the presupposition classification from Goatly(1977),factuality can be divided into factual,non-factual and counter-factual.Besides,it is found that factive words are not always restricted to verbs.Other parts of speech should be taken into consideration.Therefore,a list of detailed examples on Chinese factive operators is also presented.The second question is how different factive verbs behave under different grammatical environment.In order to explore the syntactic and semantic features of different factive operators,the typical factive verbs in each type are used to test in terms of negation raising,nominalization,interrogative,and tense.It turns out that all the factuality can remain the same except that factive verbs in negative form combining with A-not-A question will cause factuality shift and counter factive verbs show non-factuality after negation raising.The third question focuses on how to give a felicitous explanation on factive sentences with subjective prediction.Since the complement sentence doesn’t always convey absolute truth,some subordinate clauses with subjective predicate are explored.It is argued that differing from object predication,subjective predication in complement sentences will bring different interpretations.According to relativism,sentences will have different truth-value relative to different individuals.Therefore,three kinds of stances such as,auto centric,exocentric and acentric are adopted when we are dealing with subjective predication in factive sentences.On the basis of detailed language description in mandarin Chinese,this thesis has given more over thinking on factuality,which provides a good idea on the study of Chinese grammar category,and some enlightenment to Chinese teaching.