The Semantic Analysis Of Mandarin Bare Noun Phrases

The semantics of bare noun phrases has been among topics which have attracted great attention of linguists over the past few decades. But there was a little research done concerning the semantics of bare noun phrases in Mandarin Chinese. As a result, this thesis aims at analyzing the semantics of Mandarin bare noun phrases comprehensively.This thesis mainly investigates the semantics of Mandarin bare noun phrases in comparison with that of English bare noun phrases, and also addresses the issue of factors that influence the semantic interpretation of Mandarin bare noun phrases.This paper firstly studies the semantics of bare noun phrases in Mandarin Chinese, and presents empirical cross-linguistic evidence from Mandarin Chinese in support of the Kind-referring Analysis in English. We argue that Mandarin bare noun phrases should be analyzed as kind-denoting terms, on a par with their English counterparts. Their extra definite readings as well as their difficulties in being indefinite subjects in some contexts are simply natural consequences of Chinese language-specific properties.It also explores factors that exert influences on the interpretation of bare noun phrases in Mandarin Chinese, with a main focus on the interaction of predicate types, syntactic positions and the interpretation of Mandarin bare noun phrases. For Mandarin Chinese, we could further divide the individual-level/stage-level predicate classification in English into four subclasses, i.e., Class I individual-level predicates, Class II individual-level predicates, dynamic stage-level predicates and stative stage-level predicate. And we argue that the interpretation of bare noun phrases in Mandarin Chinese are influenced by the predicate types,and make two generalizations as follows:(1) Generalization I:In the context of Class I individual-level predicates, the BNP subject is always generic; while with Class II individual-level predicates, when the predicate is applied to a kind, the BNP subject is generic, otherwise, it is definite; and the BNP object (if it has one) is always generic.(2) Generalization II: In the context of stage-level predicates, the Mandarin BNP subject and object (if it has one) can only be definite or indefinite; while the indefinite interpretations of Mandarin BNP subjects in episodic sentences with dynamic stage-level predicates are more easily obtained than with stative stage-level predicates.