| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 101 === The purpose of this thesis is to examine the polarity phenomenon of two lower-scale intensifiers in Chinese, ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ and ‘yidian(r)’, which are traditionally viewed as synonyms to English ‘a little’ and ‘a bit’. English lower-scale intensifiers ‘a little’ and ‘a bit’ have received much attention and previous analyses have shown that the former is a diminisher and a positive polarity item (PPI), while the latter is a minimizer and a negative polarity item (NPI). Despite a wealth of literature on English ‘a little’ and ‘a bit’, little attention has been paid to Chinese lower-scale intensifiers ‘you (yi)dian(r)’ and ‘yidian(r)’. First, ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ and ‘yidian(r)’ occur in different modifying positions. It is observed that in modifying gradable predicates, ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ stays in the pre-predicate modifying position while ‘(yi)dian(r)’ modifies them in post-predicative position. However, each of them exerts different modification force on the predicates, the construction of “‘you(yi)dian(r)’+(Pred.)” is involved in implicit comparison and that of “(Pred.)+ ‘yidian(r)’” is in explicit comparison, based on the theoretical accounts of Liu (2010) and Kennedy &; McNally (2005). Second, the contrast of implicit and explicit comparison in DM ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ and MP ‘yidian(r)’ respectively provides us important clues to the diminisher and minimizer dichotomy. However, after adopting Giannakidou’s (1998) (non)veridicality approach, this paper argues that Chinese lower-scale intensifiers do not show the distinct dichotomies of PPI-NPI and diminisher-minimizer, since both are able to entail total negation meaning under the main negative marker ‘mei(you)’ with EVEN denotation, which is a typical NPI-minimizer property. Meanwhile, both can generate litotes reading (one form of metalinguistic negation) through the negative marker ‘bushi’ with ''shi'' as a focus marker, and metalinguisitc negation happens to be a common PPI-diminisher feature.
In spite of this, this paper provides an initial study for Chinese lower-scale intensifiers ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ and ‘yidian(r)’, and conludes that their syntactic categories are degree modifier (‘you(yi)dian(r)’) and measure phrase (‘yidian(r)’), and the former is involved in implicit comparison while the latter is in explicit comparison in the semantic aspect. Still, the diminisher-minimizer and PPI-NPI statuses in Chinese lower-scale intensifiers ‘you(yi)dian(r)’ and ‘yidian(r)’ are not as distinct as those of Enlgish lower-scale intensifiers ''a little’ and ‘a bit’.
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