STUDIES ON QUANTIFICATION IN CHINESE (SYNTAX, LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, QUANTIFIER SCOPE, CHINA)

This study of quantification in Mandarin Chinese consists of two parts. The first part (Chapter One) presents a Government-Binding analysis of three issues in Chinese syntax: universal quantification, the distribution and referential properties of quantifier phrases and quantifier scope. The theory of quantification developed in May (1977, 1985) is adopted for the main body of this work. We propose that quantifier phrases in Chinese have the dual property of being able to function both as operators and as variables and that in Chinese the clausal node Quantifier Raising (QR) adjoins to is S'' rather than S. These assumptions allow us to account for a range of distributional and referential properties of quantifiers in the language. We also present evidence from Chinese showing that QR is essentially clause-bounded and that for Chinese the crucial determinants of scope order within the clausal domain is linear precedence rather than c-command.;The second part of the dissertation draws on the theoretical findings of Chapter One, and explores ontogenetic aspects of some of the quantificational properties of Chinese, specifically the isomorphic scope interpretation principle according to which the relative scope of two quantificational expressions can be mapped directly from Surface Structure. A principled account of how children may acquire quantificational competence is proposed, in which we argue that children initially view quantifiers as non-operators and that the relative scope property of quantifiers is learned on the basis of positive evidence. A parameter of scope order is also motivated. Experimental findings are reported on how Mandarin-speaking children and English-speaking children between three and eight years of age interpret sentences containing a universal quantifier and an existential quantifier. Our findings on acquisition of quantificational scope in Chinese support the hypothesis that the unmarked interpretation of quantifier phrases is a referential one, and that the divergences between the English and Chinese data may be due to cross-linguistic syntactic differences with respect to the quantifier phrases included in the experiment.