Depression Of Ambiguity In Negation In Mandarin Chinese And English

This thesis studies ambiguity in negation in Mandarin Chinese and English and aims at establishing a linguistic model for the depression of ambiguity in discussion through the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.In order to better understand ambiguity in negation, the current study categorizes the ambiguous cases into three different groups in both Mandarin Chinese and English and finds disparity between the two languages. Then we analyze these ambiguous cases at syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels. We introduce D-structure and S-structure as well as the NegP Hypothesis at syntactic level, the negative logic operator at semantic level, and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory at pragmatic level. With these theories we probe into the nature and the depression of ambiguity in negation, which leads to the following conclusions: if the source of ambiguity of a sentence is only syntactic, then the ambiguous readings can be accounted for through syntactic analysis by obtaining single-meaning sentences; negative sentences which are semantically ambiguous can get a relatively sound explanation, with their corresponding single-meaning readings obtained through the analysis of the negative logic operator and its negative target; the final understanding - the most and best relevant reading - has to be obtained within a certain context, based on syntactic and semantic analyses.Therefore, we come to the final conclusion that the depression of ambiguity in negation requires the combination of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge, regardless of what specific category of ambiguity it is. We also touch upon the order of functioning of these different linguistic components in our model, but no satisfactory results have been achieved.