Mandarin SHENME as a superweak NPI

Fred Weerman · Hedde Zeijlstra

65 citations0/0 files storedUvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam)

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Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Language Development and Disorders Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

In the past thirty years, Frans Zwarts has written several papers providing crucial insight in licensing contexts for Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), presenting a more nuanced picture than Ladusaw’s (1979) downward entailing (DE) requirement. Zwarts demonstrated (1981) that a number of Dutch NPIs appear only in a subset of DE-contexts, and proposed (1995) non-veridicality as a logico-semantic property that licenses so-called superweak NPIs. Such superweak NPIs, however, have hardly been attested. We show that Mandarin shenme (‘a (thing)’) is a prototypical superweak NPI. We explain its ungrammaticality in veridical contexts by arguing that shenme exhibits a lexical referential deficiency. Acquisitional data, furthermore, suggest that children initially analyze shenme as a WH-quantifier but acquire the referential deficiency underlying its NPI status after the age of four.

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References

1998Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar 1980Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations 1984The logical problem of language acquisition . Edited by C. L. Baker and John J. McCarthy. (Series on cognitive theory and mental representation, 1.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Pp. xii, 358. $27.50.1993Negative evidence in language acquisition 1997The Landscape of Polarity Items 1992Indefinite Wh in Mandarin Chinese 1991Affectedness and direct objects: The role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of verb argument structure 1999Negative contexts: Collocation, polarity, and multiple negation. By Ton van der Wouden. (Routledge studies in Germanic linguistics.) London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. 301.

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2015Acquiring Negative Polarity Items 2019Quantification 2016Negation and Negative Dependencies 2019Constraint-Based Pragmatic Processing 2019Scalar Implicatures

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