Polarity Sensitive Expressions in Child Mandarin

Abstract

In addition to serving as question markers with interrogative force, wh-words such as shenme ‘what’ in Mandarin Chinese have a noninterrogative meaning. For the noninterrogative meaning, these words have been typically analyzed as negative polarity items, i.e., as wh-pronouns that are similar in meaning to the English NPI any and to its Mandarin counterpart renhe. This accounts for the None reading that is generated in negative statements with wh-words. However, negative sentences with the wh-word shenme ‘what’ can also be assigned another reading, in certain circumstances. We refer to this as the Insignificance (not much) reading. This reading is not possible for sentences with the NPI renhe. The None reading is the default interpretation for negative sentences with either renhe or shenme because the Insignificance reading of the negated shenme sentences requires contextual support. Like English “not much,” the Insignificance reading of negated shenme sentences in Mandarin makes a sentence true in a broader range of circumstances than the corresponding sentence with the NPI renhe. Both the fact that the Insignificance reading requires contextual support and considerations of language learnability in the absence of negative evidence lead us to expect the Insignificance reading to emerge later than the None reading in the course of language development. An experimental study of Mandarin-speaking children of different ages supported this expectation. The youngest group of children only assigned the None reading to negative sentences with shenme as well as to sentences with renhe. However, older children and adults accessed the Insignificance reading.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was carried out when the first author was affiliated at Macquarie University/the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD). Some of the findings from the present article were presented at GLOW-in-Asia VIII, TEAL 6, at ICFL 5, and in talks at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), Tianjin Normal University and Chinese University of Hong Kong. We thank the audiences for their comments, in particular Takuya Goro, Thomas Hun-tak Lee, and Jo-wang Lin. We have also benefited from discussions with the following colleagues: Nobuaki Akagi, Maggie Liao, Anna Notley, Esther Su, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Likan Zhan, Peng Zhou, and especially Rosalind Thornton. Finally, we express our sincere thanks to Liqun Gao of BLCU and to Xin Chen of No. 2 Primary School, Haidian District, Beijing, for their assistance in conducting the experiments.

Notes

¹ In this study, we focus only on noninterrogative uses of shenme. For the sake of brevity, we refer to noninterrogative wh-pronouns simply as wh-pronouns.

² In the Chinese literature, wh-pronouns have been given different names. In addition to being referred to as Negative Polarity Items, they are also called “existential polarity wh-phrases” (Lin 1996, 1998) or simply “polarity items” (Cheng 1991, 1994).

³ Sections 2–3 summarize the theoretical analysis presented in another article by A. Huang (2013).

⁴ There is a subtle difference in meaning between not much in English and mei shenme in Mandarin. In particular, John did not buy much food conveys only a lack in quantity (i.e., the amount of food bought by John is relatively small). By contrast, Yuehan mei mai shenme dongxi ‘John-not-buy-what-food’ can express both an insignificance in quantity (i.e., the amount of food is relatively small), and an insignificance in quality (i.e., the kind of food is not significant though there could be a lot of it).

⁵ The derivation of the Insignificance reading is represented more formally in the logical form in (i). Suppose that the domain of discourse contains four types of food, i.e., p(izzas), h(amburgers) and n(oodles) and pr(awns). Suppose, further, that p, h, and n are contextually “significant,” whereas pr is “insignificant.” Applying one of de Morgan’s Laws ¬ (A ∨ B) ⇒ ¬ A ∧ ¬ B (where ∨ and ∧ correspond to Boolean disjunction and conjunction respectively), we derive the entailment that Mr. Pig did not eat any significant food. By implicature (represented as →), the inferred meaning is that Mr. Pig may have eaten some insignificant kind of food.

(i) ¬∃ x[ Eat’(Pig, x) & Food’(x) & x ∈{p, h, n, }] = ¬ [Eat’ (Pig, p) ∨Eat’ (Pig, h) ∨Eat’ (Pig, n)] = ¬ Eat’ (Pig, p) ∧ ¬ Eat’ (Pig, h) ∧ ¬ Eat’ (Pig, n)] → Mr. Pig may have eaten a prawn.

⁶ The Insignificance reading is highly frequent in Mandarin Chinese. It seems unreasonable to suppose that children will be content to observe adults producing abundant false statements with the same lexical item, in violation of the norms of conversation, which entreat speakers to say what they believe to be true (see Grice 1989).

⁷ The pragmatic inferences involved in the construction of the Insignificance reading are not the same as those that pertain to scalar terms like some (implying not all). The Insignificance reading is inferred by the denial of the existence of significant entities. Therefore, the kind of pragmatic inferences involved in the Insignificance reading are not exactly those of scalar inferences (see Levinson 2000:79–80 and Matsumoto 1995).

⁸ Wh-pronouns in Mandarin Chinese, including shenme, can pick up a specific semantic value from their preceding linguistic context. Bare conditionals with wh-pronouns represent such a context-dependent feature of wh-pronouns in Mandarin Chinese (see Tsai 1994; Cheng & Huang 1996; J.-W. Lin 1996; Chierchia 2000; Pan & Jiang, in press).

⁹ The derivation of the None reading is represented in (i). Suppose that the discourse contains four types of pearls: p, q, r, and s. The context is one in which Mr. Pig did not find any of the pearls, i.e., the None reading.

(i) ¬∃x[ Found’(Pig, x) & Pearl’(x) & x ∈ {p, q, r, s}] = ¬ [Found’ (Pig, p) ∨ Found’ (Pig, q) ∨ Found’ (Pig, r) ∨ Found’ (Pig, s)] = ¬ Found’ (Pig, p) ∧ ¬ Found’ (Pig, q) ∧ ¬ Found’ (Pig, r) ∧ ¬ Found’ (Pig, s)}

¹⁰ The same 10 adults were also tested with the story (3) and the negated shenme sentence (4). They accepted the test sentence 100% of the time, showing they assigned the Insignificance reading to (4) in the context in (3). The fact that the same Mandarin-speaking adults accepted (8) but rejected (4) supports our proposal that the interpretation of shenme depends on discourse context.

¹¹ Kadmon and Landman (1993) discuss the domain widening of any in English by comparing the interpretative difference between (i) and (ii):

(i) I don’t have potatoes.

(ii) I don’t have any potatoes.

It is argued that (i) may be true if I have some rotten potatoes in the backyard. This is because, in a context of utterance, the domain of quantification that is associated with a common noun (i.e., potatoes) includes just typical kinds of entities (i.e., cooking potatoes) and leaves out atypical kinds of potatoes (i.e., rotten potatoes, decorative potatoes). However, when any is attached to a common noun, as in (ii), the sentence implies that the speaker lacks potatoes of all kinds, both typical and atypical. As one of the reviewers points out, there is sometimes a “nothing significant” reading for English any. Nevertheless, in Mandarin Chinese, renhe does not allow the same Insignificance reading. A speaker who wants to convey this reading must use shenme.

¹² We used a between-subject design in order to avoid carryover effects between trials. In pilot testing, the renhe sentences and the shenme sentences were presented to the same subjects. In this study, some children fluctuated between the None reading and the Insignificance reading in their interpretation of the shenme sentences. It was unclear whether this fluctuation was due to carryover effects or represented children’s multiple interpretations for the shenme sentences. The present study used a between-subject design to avoid such effects.

¹³ We have substituted the word any for some in the indirect scale. The reason is that English some is a positive polarity item and, by definition, must take scope over negation. So, not some does not mean “none,” which is the meaning of the strongest term on the indirect scale. Similarly, we use mei renhe rather than mei yixie to indicate the strongest term “none” on the indirect scale in Mandarin.