Antonyms? Presuppositions? on the Semantics of Two Evaluative Modals Jingran and Guoran in Mandarin

Jiun-Shiung Wu

《Taiwan Journal of Linguistics》 6卷1期 (2008/06) Pp. 97-117

https://doi.org/10.6519/TJL.2008.6(1).3

並列摘要

Jingran indicates that the (non)occurrence of a situation that it presents contradicts the expectation, while guoran indicates that the (non) occurrence of a situation presented by it converges with the expectation Arguing against Hsieh's (2005, 2006a, 2006b) proposal that evaluative modals in Mandarin do not have a model-theoretic semantics, Ⅰ propose that, given that the expectation serves as a modal base B which an evaluative conversational background forms, jingran presents a proposition which represents a simple necessity of negation in a possible world w with respect to B, whereas guoran presents a proposition which is equivalent to a simple necessity in a possible world w with respect to B Contrary to Hsieh's claim that modality in Mandarin has a language-specific property, i e , that the semantics of certain modals in Mandarin cannot be defined in terms of possibility and necessity, Ⅰ seek to fit modality in Mandarin into a bigger picture of modality in general and show that it is possible to achieve a universally valid notional category of modality, similar to the works of Kratzer (1981), though different languages may have language-specific choices for modal bases, which result in different types of modality in languages.

並列關鍵字

jingran ； guoran ； evaluative modals ； modality ； semantics ； Mandarin

參考文獻

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