Acquisition of polarity-sensitive items in Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese wh-pronouns such as shenme 'what' and shei 'who' are widely interpreted as negative polarity items, due to the similarity in distribution and interpretation between wh-pronouns and the polarity sensitive item any in English. Against this general theoretical background, this thesis contends that wh-pronouns in Mandarin Chinese are not homogeneous. I illustrate this by examining the interpretation of two wh-pronouns, namely, shenme 'what' and ji-ge 'how many-classifier'. I particularly focus on the interpretation of these two wh-pronouns in simple negative statements. While negated shenme sentences receive both a 'none' reading and an 'insignificance' reading, negated ji-ge sentences receive a 'small-amount' reading. Both cases depart from negative statements containing renhe (which is the Chinese equivalent of English any); negated renhe sentences can only be assigned the 'none' reading. Various semantic and pragmatic factors contribute the interpretation of renhe, shenme and ji-ge in negative statements, and these theoretical issues have implications for child language development. In a series of controlled experiments, I investigated Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of (i) sentences containing negative polarity item renhe; (ii) sentences containing free choice renhe; (iii) negated renhe sentences versus negated shenme sentences; (iv) negated ji-ge sentences. The general findings are that while the relevant pragmatic knowledge as related to the interpretation of these polarity items are delayed in Mandarin-speaking children, their semantic knowledge of these polarity items are in place early in the course of language development. This study offers new data on the acquisition of polarity sensitive items, and sheds new light on the linguistic theory of wh-pronouns in Mandarin Chinese.