Projective Meaning in Mandarin Chinese: A Case Study Approach

Multidimensional semantic theory has greatly influenced the semantic and pragmatic research of natural languages in the past few decades, but Chinese-based research in this direction has been very scarce so far.
This monograph, through five case studies, investigates the distributional, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of adverbs, logical words (negative words and conditional connectives), focus particles, pleonastic negation and classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. It provides new data from Chinese that relate to projective meaning and multidimensional semantic research, and combines formal analyses with corpus-linguistic and experimental methods. The results show that the existing diagnostic tests are not fully applicable for Chinese but need adjustments. Overall, the work shows that multidimensional semantics is a general theory with strong explanatory and predictive power for natural language semantics and pragmatics, and can provide new perspectives for old phenomena. The book provides a Chinese-based example for this purpose, and hopes to have implications for future semantic and pragmatic research on Chinese, other languages or dialects within China, and cross-linguistic comparisons.