This chapter investigates wh-items in Mandarin from a cross-linguistic perspective, seeking to unify their various uses. It stems from: (i) previous approaches to indefinites in Chinese (Cheng 1991; Lin 1998); (ii) Kartunnen’s semantics for questions; (iii) recent work on epistemic indefinites (EIs); and (iv) recent approaches to polarity (e.g. Chierchia 2013). The chapter claims that indefinites in all languages denote existential terms and activate a grammatically determined set of alternatives, factored into meaning through a process of ‘exhaustification’, responsible for the scalar and ‘free choice’ readings of ordinary indefinites (OIs). EIs are viewed in the same way, the only difference from OIs being that EIs’ alternatives cannot be ‘pruned’ (i.e. ‘ignored’) depending on the context. Therefore, with EIs, epistemic effects come about obligatorily. The differences within types of EIs (including Chinese wh’s) are part of (a small set of) parametric differences on how alternatives can be factored in.

With the popularization of Web and image devices, there are more and more digital images available on the Internet. How to effectively organize and manage these web images becomes a critical issue. In this paper, a novel approach that employs the relationships between words to achieve web image annotations is proposed. First, the related textual information associated with web images is identified as the candidate annotations for web images. Second, the word co-occurrence is utilized to eliminate irrelevant keywords for improving the annotation accuracy. Then, the keyword-based association analysis is exploited to further discover possible semantics for enriching the final annotations of web images. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

This study of Chinese adverbial ziji investigates why cross-linguistically adverbial intensifiers often develop two different uses, namely the exclusive use and the inclusive use. Arguing against the polysemous account proposed in previous works like Siemund (2000), and assuming the mechanism suggested in Liao (2018) for exclusive ziji, the paper presents a new analysis revised from Gast’s (2006) account for intensifiers. In the analysis, there is only one ziji for all its adverbial uses. By adjoining to different X’ positions in the structure, adverbial ziji may get different surface meanings. Despite the surface differences, adverbial ziji always has the following semantics: it works as an identity function, evokes alternatives for consideration, and receives an exclusive meaning after the application of the covert exhaustivity operator O. Based on the evidence presented, the analysis crucially assumes that adverbial ziji may adjoin to Topic’, and this adjunction leads to the effect that the subsequent exhaustification is done over a set of alternative propositions that vary in topics. In such a case, alternative individuals evoked by ziji do not have to be excluded from having the property described by the VP in question. This makes the assertion of a ziji-sentence in inclusive context possible, and accounts for why intensifier ziji has a disguised inclusive function. By proposing such a unified account of ziji, the paper explains why cross-linguistically intensifiers often develop the various uses observed.

A unified semantics of Chinese adverbial ziji 'self' is proposed for its three exclusive readings. In the proposal, adverbial ziji is a focused item, evoking alternatives for consideration by its focus semantic value. Depending on domain variation and different syntactic adjoining positions, ziji shows various surface readings, though the availability of readings is affected by context, world knowledge, and a relation presupposition triggered by ziji. The proposed mechanism suggests the following. First, CauseP for internal causation cannot be introduced by ziji, but is projected more prevalently than commonly assumed. Second, CauseP should be projected in anticausatives. If this analysis is on the right track, it will give us a new perspective of intensifiers and the projection of CauseP, and it will also help us advance the study of anticausatives.