Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Desp...Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Despite of the extensive studies of BNPs in English and Chinese respectively, a systematic comparison between English and Chinese BNPs in semantic readings is still less developed. More detailed studies and comparisons are obviously desirable. Most linguists agree that the semantics of the predicates, syntactic distribution and pragmatic factors all have a role to play in determining the interpretation of BNPs. Thus the paper has systematically made a semantic comparison between English BNPs and Chinese BNPs in terms of different predicate types and different syntactic distributions following the four semantic readings of BNPs of Shen(2005), namely, generic reading, existential reading,definite reading and non-referential reading.展开更多
This paper presents an interpretation of Gongsun Long＇s white horse paradox. The Chinese sentence he uses to state his main thesis （Bai ma fei ma） has two potential readings： （a） The white horses are not horses....This paper presents an interpretation of Gongsun Long＇s white horse paradox. The Chinese sentence he uses to state his main thesis （Bai ma fei ma） has two potential readings： （a） The white horses are not horses. （b） The white horses are not the horses Although （a） gives the usual and correct reading of the sentence, according to the interpretation, Gongsun Long takes it to state （b）. He gives good arguments for （b） while taking them to establish （a） as well, for he fails to distinguish between the two different theses. In presenting this interpretation, the paper gives an account of the function of numeral classifiers and discusses the semantics of count nouns in languages with no grammatical number system, including classical Chinese and classifier languages （e.g., contemporary Chinese）.展开更多
文摘Since Carlson(1977), bare noun phrases(which willbe referred to as BNPs afterwards) have been a focus of linguistics in English. Gradually, the studies of bare noun phrase has also caught much attention in China. Despite of the extensive studies of BNPs in English and Chinese respectively, a systematic comparison between English and Chinese BNPs in semantic readings is still less developed. More detailed studies and comparisons are obviously desirable. Most linguists agree that the semantics of the predicates, syntactic distribution and pragmatic factors all have a role to play in determining the interpretation of BNPs. Thus the paper has systematically made a semantic comparison between English BNPs and Chinese BNPs in terms of different predicate types and different syntactic distributions following the four semantic readings of BNPs of Shen(2005), namely, generic reading, existential reading,definite reading and non-referential reading.
文摘This paper presents an interpretation of Gongsun Long＇s white horse paradox. The Chinese sentence he uses to state his main thesis （Bai ma fei ma） has two potential readings： （a） The white horses are not horses. （b） The white horses are not the horses Although （a） gives the usual and correct reading of the sentence, according to the interpretation, Gongsun Long takes it to state （b）. He gives good arguments for （b） while taking them to establish （a） as well, for he fails to distinguish between the two different theses. In presenting this interpretation, the paper gives an account of the function of numeral classifiers and discusses the semantics of count nouns in languages with no grammatical number system, including classical Chinese and classifier languages （e.g., contemporary Chinese）.
