A Study Of Chinese Factive Verbs As Presupposition Triggers

Presupposition can be regarded as the important semantic information presupposed by the sentence. The presuppositional study of verbs may enhance our understanding of the semantic and syntactic features of these verbs. In retrospect, the microscopic studies of the subtype of presupposition triggers are rare in Chinese, and the present research attempt to investigate Chinese factive verbs as presupposition triggers from the perspective of semantic presupposition.We explore the semantic subcategorization of Chinese factive verbs based on the selectional restriction of different semantic connotations of these verbs. Then the semantic analysis and description of these Chinese factive verbs including their semantic connotations, semantic features and semantic structures, etc. are investigated. Then we investigate the presuppositional mechanism of Chinese factive verbs based on the semantic analysis of their logical value, semantic features, semantic connotations, semantic mechanism and the internal relationship between the semantic structures of Chinese factive verbs and their presuppositions. We compare the presupposition and inner linguistic mechanism between Chinese and English factive verbs to find their similarities and differences.Factive verbs can trigger factive presupposition, mainly presented as the subject or subject clause, object or object clause in a sentence. This presupposition demonstrates a definite proposition whose logic value is always true. We find that all the Chinese factive verbs work as the"holes"in the projection for all of them allow presuppositions of lower sentence to be projected into the presuppositions of the complex whole; the presuppositions stimulated by these verbs function as the internal arguments in their semantic structures, and the logical value of the proposition of their factive presupposition is always true; the presupposition of factive verbs work under three linguistic mechanism: the mechanism of conventionality, the mechanism of inference from logical relations embedded in semantic implicature; the mechanism of background information surviving in the negative form of the verbs; and the presupposition and inner linguistic mechanism of Chinese and English factive verbs are the same.We hope adopting western linguistic theoretical frameworks to examine the linguistic mechanism of Chinese factive verbs may shed light on the study of presupposition triggers and Chinese verbs in syntax and semantics.