On Quantification Of Two Types Of Chinese Donkey Sentences

Ever since Cheng and Huang (1996) made the introductory identification of twotypes of conditionals as Chinese donkey sentences, many other linguists have sharedtheir opinions over this language phenomenon, with their research focus on thepartition between ‘bare conditionals’ and ‘ruguo/dou-’ conditionals, as well as therespective theoretical explanation under the framework of DRT and EPA. However, theexistence of the other type of donkey sentences is ignored and no agreement has beenreached as to the identity of wh-words and pronouns involved. Therefore, this thesis isdedicated to address these two issues: one is to construct a relatively full picture of thedistribution of Chinese donkey sentences, and the other deals with the quantification inChinese donkey sentences.In response to these two subjects, three proposals shall be provided in this thesis.The first proposal puts forward to the existence of two types of donkey sentences inChinese, one in conditional configuration and the other in relative clause configuration.Specifically, donkey conditionals are composed of relative structure of indefinites,represented by wh-…wh-structure and NP…NP structure, and regular structure with aconditional marker like ‘ruguo/yaoshi’. As for quantified donkey relative clauses, thesyntactic existence of relative clauses realized by the form ‘VP+de+NP’ shall beproved first and then their semantic features will be checked, which shows similarperformance with their English counterparts.The second proposal deals with the wh-words in the antecedent clauses of donkeyconditionals. They are proposed to be existential quantifiers, licensed by an overt orcovert conditional marker, subject to quantifier raising. By stating this, we are in aposition for one paradigm of conditionals despite their difference in morphologicalrealization. There is an abstract conditional operator in relative structure of indefinites,by analogy with donkey conditionals in regular structure.The third proposal concerns the wh-words and pronouns in the consequentclauses of donkey conditionals. After resorting to Novelty Condition, PartitiveConstraint and analyzing their association with old discourse referents, we draw theconclusion that they are definite in nature, but their reading of the Russellian definiteis excluded because neither uniqueness nor existence is strictly observed. They areproposed to be anaphoric definite NPs, denoting a maximal plural identity.To conclude, non-interrogative wh-phrases in Chinese donkey sentences demonstrate dual identities, i.e. existential quantifiers and definite NPs, which displaygreat similarity with bare NPs in quantified donkey relative clauses. Thus, we deducethat non-interrogative wh-words are pro-forms of bare NPs.