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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 22:4 (2021) ► pp.630–660

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Processing of the Mandarin polarity item renhe ‘any’

 | Georgia Institute of Technology
 | Stony Brook University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 29 October 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00093.wu
Abstract
The Mandarin renhe is similar to the English any in terms of polarity sensitivity (Wang, Yu-Fang Flora. 1993. The Chinese NPI renhe in contexts with negative values. In Huang, Chu-Ren & Chang, Claire Hsun-hui & Chen, Keh-jiann & Liu, Cheng-Hui (eds.), Proceedings of the First Pacific Asia Conference on Formal and Computational Linguistics: PACFoCoL I (1993), 265–281. Taipei: The Computational Linguistics Society of R.O.C.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wang, Yu-Fang Flora & Hsieh, Miao-Ling. 1996. A syntactic study of the Chinese negative polarity item renhe. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale [East Asian Languages and Linguistics] 25(1). 35–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kuo, Chin-Man. 2003. The fine structure of negative polarity items in Chinese. Los Angeles: University of Southern California. (Doctoral dissertation.)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2013. The non-uniformity of wh-indeterminates with polarity and free choice in Chinese. In Gil, Kook-Hee & Harlow, Steve & Tsoulas, George (eds.), Strategies of quantification (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 44), 123–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Spector, Benjamin & Egré, Paul. 2015. A uniform semantics for embedded interrogatives: An answer, not necessarily the answer. Synthese 192(6). 1729–1784. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, the following phenomena regarding any in relative clause environments have not been surveyed with respect to renhe: (a) the NPI illusion effect reported in studies like Parker & Phillips (Parker, Dan & Phillips, Colin. 2011. Illusory negative polarity item licensing is selective. (Poster presented at the 24th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Palo Alto, 24–26 March 2011.); . 2016. Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory. Cognition 1571. 321–339. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar); (b) the subtrigging effect discussed in LeGrand, Jean Ehrenkranz. 1975. Or and any: The semantics and syntax of two logical operators. Chicago: University of Chicago. (Doctoral dissertation.)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Dayal (Dayal, Veneeta. 1998. Any as inherently modal. Linguistics and Philosophy 21(5). 433–476. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2004. The universal force of free choice any. In Pica, Pierre & Rooryck, Johan & van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen (eds.), Linguistic variation yearbook 2004 (Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4), 5–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We conducted two untimed, offline acceptability judgment experiments and the results suggest that: (i) NPI illusion does not appear in Mandarin in untimed offline processing, (ii) the subtrigging effect of renhe holds, and (iii) renhe can be licensed by certain types of declarative verbs like tongyi ‘agree’ and zancheng ‘approve’. The results confirm the strict structural requirement of the c-commanding relation between a negation licensor and renhe (Wang, Yu-Fang Flora. 1993. The Chinese NPI renhe in contexts with negative values. In Huang, Chu-Ren & Chang, Claire Hsun-hui & Chen, Keh-jiann & Liu, Cheng-Hui (eds.), Proceedings of the First Pacific Asia Conference on Formal and Computational Linguistics: PACFoCoL I (1993), 265–281. Taipei: The Computational Linguistics Society of R.O.C.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and the licensing of renhe in non-veridical contexts (Cheng & Giannakidou 2013), and further suggest additional licensing environments for renhe: relative clauses and declarative verbs. This requires reconsideration of positing non-veridicality as a necessary licensing condition for renhe and calls for future research on how renhe is licensed under these two licensing environments.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Experiment 1: Investigating the illusory licensing effect of renhe
    • 2.1Stimuli and procedure
    • 2.2Participants
    • 2.3Data analysis and results
  • 3.Experiment 2: Investigating the subtrigging effect of renhe
    • 3.1Stimuli and procedure
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Data analysis and results
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1No illusion effect of renhe was found in an offline task
    • 4.2Locality and structural complexity affect processing of renhe
    • 4.3The existence of the subtrigging effect of renhe was confirmed
    • 4.4The declarative verbs can license renhe
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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