The Cartographic Approach To The Syntax And Semantics Of Adverb Jiu In Mandarin Chinese

jiu,as one of the most frequently used adverbs in Mandarin Chinese,has attracted the attention of many linguists because of its ambiguity.The aim of the thesis is to discuss how the different meanings of adverb jiu are derived.Adverb jiu has different readings.It is widely acknowledged that adverb jiu has a fixed core meaning and the interactions between the core sense and different contexts give rise to its different meanings.However,there is no consensus on the core sense of adverb jiu and thederivation process of its multiple meanings.Having reviewed related literature,we suppose that the different syntactic positions of adverb jiu have an influence on the interpretationprocess of jiu's core sense,deriving different readings at last.Based on the above ideas,the thesis focuses on the following three research questions:?1?What are the syntactic positions of different use types of adverb jiu??2?What is the core sense of adverb jiu??3?How do the core sense and the syntactic positions jointly contribute to the various readings of adverb jiu?Based on Cartographic Theory and Alternative Semantics,we find that the answers to the above questions can be presented as follows:?1?The usages of adverb jiu can be classified into5 types;the syntactic position of adverb jiu varies from type to type.Emphatic jiu adjoins to M^DynP or T?Past?P;aspectual jiu is a T?Future?P adjunct;focusing jiu can adjoin to VP,TP or CP;parametric jiu and scalar jiu are TP adjuncts and must have a pre-jiu associate hosted by the TopicP in the Left Periphery.?2?We think that the core meaning of adverb jiu is made up of three parts:only_weak,scalar presupposition and expected value under consideration.Adverb jiu on different syntactic positions can be associated with constituents of different types,which serve as the foci or contrastive topic and trigger different alternative sets.And the core sense of adverb jiu is applied to these sets,resulting in different readings of adverb jiu.That is the truth of the ambiguity of adverb jiu.