Abstract
This paper re-examines temporal hái thoroughly. Two issues concerning hái cannot be taken care of by previous studies. The firs one is why hái always scopes over negation, syntactically and semantically. The second is related to the first one: why the continuation reading expressed by hái cannot be canceled. Temporal hái is argued, in this paper, to denote continuation of a situation and to presuppose modal necessity of a negated proposition, either weak epistemic necessity or deontic necessity. The two issues raised are explained in the following way: the reading which negation + hái could theoretically express is redundant with the presupposition, and redundancy is dispreferred. This paper also discusses other minor issues including how the underspecification between weak epistemic necessity and deontic necessity can be resolved and why it is weak epistemic necessity, instead of regular or even intensified epistemic necessity.
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Notes
- 1.
The abbreviations used in this paper are: asso for an associative marker, cl for a classifier, mw for a measure word, deon for a deontic modal, epi for an epistemic modal, Pfv for a perfective aspect marker, Prc for a particle, Prg for a progressive aspect marker, Q for an interrogative particle.
- 2.
- 3.
Please note that formally a pronoun such as tā ‘he/she’ should be represented as a variable or an underspecified label, both of which require an antecedent, e.g. [19]. In this paper, because it does not affect our analysis of temporal hái, the pronoun tā ‘he/she’ is used in the formalism, as a simplification.
- 4.
[20] suggests that English modals such as ought to is weak epistemic necessity. The epistemic necessity presupposed by temporal hái is also weak in the same sense.
- 5.
Bài ‘greet’ is a transitive verb, which subcategorizes for both a subject and an object. In this example, the object is understood from the context. An underline is used to represent an understood object in the formula.
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Chung, CH., Wu, JS. (2024). Temporal Hái in Mandarin Chinese Revisited: A Presuppositional Account. In: Dong, M., Hong, JF., Lin, J., Jin, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14514. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0583-2_18
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