On The Event Quantification Of Mei

This thesis focuses on a very noteworthy demonstrative pronoun Mei in Mandarin Chinese.Based on the theory of formal semantics and event semantics,1 conduct a thorough corpus collection and a systematic statistical analysis,exploring into the function of Mei intensively.The thesis consists of five chapters and is constructed as follows:The first one is an introduction,where I evaluate previous analysis on Mei in the literature,including its lexical characteristics,semantics and pragmatics as well as the collocation and sentence patterns of Mei.Then I outline my own research approach and methodology used in this essay,specifically.Chapter two tries to define the lexical property and semantic function of Mei.Through the statistic observation of linguistic facts, I summarise six kinds of syntactic distribution of Mei.Then I provide a detailed discussion of Mei in quantificational,nominal and predicative structures respectively and conclude that Mei has the basic function of demonstration and partial reference,according to which I suggest we should treat it as a demonstrative pronoun uniformly.Meanwhile,the semantics of Mei indicates that it in fact is a distributive universal quantifier.When it appears in nominal structured forms a set which ranges over all individual objects;And when it occurs in predicative structure, it also forms a set which however ranges over all individual events,providing a time background for the subsequent predicational events.The third chapter reveals two types of event quantification structures of Mei,of which we call Mei e1 and Mei e2 separately.Then,l discuss the similarities and differences between these two structures from the perspective of syntax and aspect.l find that of four types of verbs,only activity verb,accomplishment verb and partial achievement verb can enter Mei e1 structure,whereas state verb cannot:As for Mei e2 structure,it is compatible with all four types of verbs.1 believe we can account for this discrepancy by arguing that the nature of these two event structures is different.Given that Mei e1 structure is compatible with a wide variety of aspect markers,including inchoative,perfective and resultative,but not compatible with progressive aspect and continuous aspect,the semantic nature of this event structure tends to be stage-level.Nevertheless,there are few aspect markers in the structure of Mei e2 because this structure tends to indicate habitual aspect.Chapter four discusses the discourse function of Mei. The event quantification structures of Mei always require subsequent sentences.The subsequent sentences of Mei e1 event structure often contain dou,while the subsequent sentences of Mei e2 structure often contain jiu.And I demonstrate these two discourse structures are summarization event quantification structure and consistence event quantification structure separately.Then I defend that we can use the schollin function to explain the high dependence of dou and jiu. In Mei e1 structure, the subsequent sentences do not constitute another set meeting the requirements of schollin function, so dou is used to collect preceding event variables in order to form a unified correspondence with the subsequent implicit event variables. However,in Mei e2 structure, the one-to-one correspondence between preceding clause and subsequent clause is already established.Therefore,the whole sentence emphasises the consistent relationship between the two clauses, so it is inclined to use jiu.The last chapter is the conclusion,summarising the content of this research and pointing out potential shortages and problems for future research.