漢語多義情態動詞的連用結構：語意與語用之互動 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學語言學研究所碩士論文 National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of Linguistiics Master Thesis. 指導教授: 指導教授張郇慧博士 Advisor: Prof. Hsun-Huei Chang. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. 漢語多義情態動詞的連用結構：漢語多義情態動詞的連用結構：語意與語用之互動. ‧. On the Construction of Multiple Polysemous Modal Verbs in Mandarin Chinese: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. 研究生: 研究生吳光中撰 Student: Guang-zhong Wu 中華民國九十九中華民國九十九年六月 June, 2010. v.

(2) ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF MULTIPLE POLYSEMOUS MODAL VERBS IN MANDARIN CHINESE: THE SEMANTICS-PRAGMATICS INTERFACE. BY. 政治大. Guang-Zhong Wu. 立. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. i n U. A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Institute of Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the. engchi. Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. June 2010. v.

(3) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. Copyright © 2010 Guang-Zhong Wu All Rights Reserved iii. i n U. v.

(4) Acknowledgements 誌謝辭長達二十年的學生生涯即將要畫下休止符，回首過去這段歲月雖然總會遭遇挫折甚至曾經幾度認為無法從低潮中走出來，但是幸運地這一路上我總能遇到知心的良師益友來及時幫助我逢凶化吉，也因為有您們這些貴人的支持我才能在每個求學階段克服困境勇敢大步向前而最終我也終於順利地完成碩士學位實現這個我曾經一度認為無法達成的夢想；正所謂「學海無涯」，我們可能永遠無法探究到浩瀚知識的邊際，但我相信學校教育帶給我的積極求知態度以及師長同儕間的寶貴經驗能夠讓我進入社會後勇敢地面對各種挑戰並且不斷地精進自己在逆境中成長，這不僅是對我自己也是對即將踏入社會的知識精英份子的期許。在這短暫卻豐富的三年研究所時光裡，首先我要由衷感謝我的論文指導老師張郇慧教授，在撰寫論文的艱難過程中雖然我與您見面的時候總是帶著很多難題及困惑，但是您總是笑臉迎人地不厭其煩解決我的疑慮，當我述說著撰寫論文過程中的困境時，您也耐心地靜靜聆聽而且時常給我最大的鼓勵和支持，您的無私指導與協助永遠讓我點滴在心頭；再來我要感謝我的論文口試委員清大語言所曹逢甫教授、政大語言所何萬順教授和政大英文系賴惠玲教授在論文計畫書口試中給予我很多論文架構方向的指點迷津然後在最後的論文答辯時提供很多寶貴的意見讓我這篇論文內容更加精煉；感謝曹老師在百忙之中願意提供給我這個機會讓我與您分享我的研究成果；在剛開始構思論文架構時，也要特別感謝賴老師解決我很多初步的疑問以及很熱心地提供我許多相關文獻讓我有更完臻的想法；最後更是要感謝何老師除了在論文上給予更多面相的思考之外，在課業之餘用您那幽默風趣的方式解答我很多生活上甚至是感情上的疑難雜症。在研究所的求學過程裡我還要感謝蕭宇超老師、黃瓊之老師、萬依萍老師、徐嘉慧老師、王珊珊老師和鍾曉芳老師讓我更加了解語言學各個領域的精華奧妙所在；另外要感謝第二外語的希伯來文老師魏卓生用您那活潑生動的教學方式讓我更加認識以色列的豐富文化人文內涵，尤其當我知道您精通中、德、英、法等. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 各國語言時更是讓我印象深刻，也讓我對您熱切學習語言的態度感到佩服！我還要感謝靜宜大學英文系語言學學程的所有啟蒙恩師們：何德華老師(現任教於中正語言所)、蔡恪恕老師(現任教於香港理工大學)、李靜桂老師、王萸芳老師(現任教於高師大華語所)、羅春琳老師、賴春燕老師以及黃麗蓉老師，感謝您們的指導讓我對語言學產生濃厚的興趣並且在進入研究所就讀前就已經具備紮實的語言學知識。當然最不能忘記的莫過於大學和研究所的助教們：感謝政大語言所的惠鈴助教在行政工作上的協助並且時常扮演學姊的角色督促我要具備嚴謹的做事原則，此外還要感謝靜宜英文系的碧霞和千慧助教，我永遠不會忘記大學時期和您們在系辦打工的歡樂時光，畢業之後兩度回靜宜探望老師時您們遇到我依舊熱情地為我打氣加油讓我像回到家一樣溫暖！ iv.

(5) 除了老師和助教們的提攜之外，同儕之間的友情更是驅使我完成學位的最佳後盾之ㄧ。首先是我的研究所同學：琬茹、依庭、筱茜、佩霖、郁賢，感謝您們在我苦悶的研究所生活中浥注許多的歡樂和很多無厘頭的搞笑演出讓我有動力繼續為論文奮鬥，至於其他同學旺楨、郁玲、惠鈞、翠屏、綠茜、復真、芮華、麗婷、雨倫、冠琄，我很高興有這個榮幸在這短短三年能與你們切磋知識彼此互相成長；另外我還要特別感謝句法工作室的助理郁瑩學姊和富在學長，在我為論文奮鬥之餘我非常珍惜在這短短一年與你們分享生活趣事和人生經驗的時光，也謝謝你們不斷為我打氣；此外我還要感謝博士班學長姊：菘霖、婉婷、詩敏、婉君、曉蒨、秋杏以及碩士班學長姊：元翔、妃容、容瑜、春慧、俐馨適時提供我許多寶貴的意見讓我在研究所求學路上信心倍增；當然我不能忘記要感謝我的大學學長姊：志銘、珠碧、湲浰、明芳、憬澤、曉卉和大學好友：羿卿、玉賢、靜諭、芝葳、怡如、慧琪、渝雅、育詩以及高中死黨維義、世勳在這一路上對我的鼓勵、支持和情意相挺。最後，我要將這份特別的榮耀與我摯愛的家人分享。感謝我的父親吳文耀先生以及母親江玉美女士在家境刻苦的情況下依然每天辛勤地工作栽培我到研究所畢業，每當回家總是看到您們搬著重物拚命地掙錢供我唸書，我這才意識到能夠無後顧之憂地追求自己的理想是多麼一件幸福的事情！今天我能夠順利完成碩士學位都要完全歸功於您們的無私奉獻與支持；另外還要特別感謝我的伯父吳文雄先生個人和我的大姨江玉粉女士一家人長期對我們家經濟上和精神上的支持，因為有您們分擔我父母親的辛勞，我才得以毫無保留地追求我的人生目標。. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. sit. y. Nat. io. n. al. er. 謹以此論文獻給我親愛的家人、師長、以及好友們. Ch. engchi. v. i n U. v.

(6) TABLE OF CONTENTS. Acknowledgements---------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv Table of Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ vi Chinese Abstract------------------------------------------------------------------------------viii English Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ix. CHAPTER I. Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1. 政治大. 1.1 Motivation and Purpose---------------------------------------------------------------- 2 1.2 Data Collection-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 1.3 Outline of Thesis------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7. 立. ‧ 國. 學. ‧. II. Literature Review ---------------------------------------------------------- 9 2.1 Syntactic Approach --------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 2.1.1 Syntactic Status of Chinese Modal Verbs ------------------------------------ 9 2.1.2 Generative Approach on Chinese Modals -----------------------------------17 2.2 Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Approach-----------------------------------------24 2.2.1 Descriptive-oriented Approach -----------------------------------------------24 2.2.2 Polysemy Approach ------------------------------------------------------------32 2.2.3 Context-derived Approach-----------------------------------------------------35 2.3 Remarks ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------41. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. III. Semantics-Pragmatics Analysis of Polysemous Modal Verb ----- 43 3.1 The Resolution to Unverified WORLD SITUATION--------------------------------- 43 3.2 Modal Interpretation of Polysemous Modal Verb---------------------------------46 3.2.1 YINGGAI 應該 ------------------------------------------- 46 3.2.2 KEYI 可以 and NENG 能 ----------------------------------------------------50 3.2.3 HUI 會 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------62 3.2.4 YAO 要 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------66 3.3 Summary --------------------------------------------------------------------------------70 IV. Modal Co-occurrence in Mandarin Chinese------------------------- 71 4.1 Initial Observation within Descriptive-oriented Approach ----------------------71 4.2 Modal Co-occurrence within Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Approach -----78 4.2.1 Hypothesis -----------------------------------------------------------------------78 4.2.2 Data Distribution----------------------------------------------------------------82 vi.

(7) 4.2.2.1 The Co-occurrence of Different Category ----------------------------82 4.2.2.2 The Co-occurrence within Identical Category -----------------------94 4.2.3 The Evidence of English Multiple-Modal Construction ---------------- 100 4.2.4 Discussion---------------------------------------------------------------------- 102 4.3 Summary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 107 V.. Conclusion -----------------------------------------------------------------111. References --------------------------------------------------------------------- 115 Corpus Data Resource ------------------------------------------------------ 120. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. vii. i n U. v.

(8) 國. 立. 政. 治. 大. 學. 研. 究. 所. 碩. 士. 論. 文. 提. 要. 研究所別：語言學研究所論文名稱：漢語多義情態動詞的連用結構：語意與語用之互動 On the Construction of Multiple Polysemous Modal Verbs in Mandarin Chinese: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface 指導教授：張郇慧研究生：吳光中論文提要內容：(共一冊，兩萬三千七百零二個字，分五章). 政治大. 本論文藉由系統性地闡述情態語意詮釋與情態動詞連用結構之間的關係來解. 立. 釋限制漢語多義情態動詞(應該、要、會、可以、能)連用詞序的機制。首先本文. ‧ 國. 學. 作者指出以 Lyons (1977)及 Palmer (2001)為首的描述性導向分析方法無法全面性地解釋所有漢語多義情態動詞連用的可能性，於是本文採用 Klinge (1993)的語意. ‧. 與語用互動分析方法並認為所有情態動詞本身只含有單一核心語意而且共享「潛. sit. y. Nat. 在性」(POTENTIALITY)語意來預測未證實的情狀描述(SITUATION. io. er. REPRESENTATION)是否說明實際語境形勢(WORLD SITUATION)的可能性，而此. al. v i n C h AGENT-EVENTU)。此外，經由逐一定義每個 (WORLD-EVENT)和主語型情狀描述( engchi n. 未證實的情狀描述所身處的語境主要分為兩大情狀類型：事件型情狀描述. 多義情態動詞的核心語意之後作者發現情態動詞說明未證實的情狀描述與實際語境形勢之間關係的預測強度是影響漢語多義情態動詞連用結構中詞序限制的主要因素；作者也舉出英語方言中的情態助動詞連用情形來證明本研究中所採用的語意與語用互動分析方法之下的概括性結論在跨語言間可以獲得普遍性支持。. viii.

(9) Abstract. The purpose of this study is to formulate a schematic representation of modal form-meaning correspondence to explicate the mechanism governing the ordering constraint of Chinese polysemous modal verbs – YINGGAI 應該, YAO 要, HUI 會, KEYI 可以, NENG 能– in one utterance. We first point out the traditional descriptive-oriented approach argued by Lyons (1977) and Palmer (2001) cannot. 政治大. comprehensively explain all possible Chinese modal co-occurrence. Hence, the. 立. alternative semantics-pragmatics interface approach suggested by Klinge (1993) in. ‧ 國. 學. this study argues that various modal interpretations are not encoded in modal lexemes but induced by the following inference process: the modal verbs which share the same. ‧. semantic field of POTENTIALITY specify the correspondence between the unverified. sit. y. of two major situation types, i.e. WORLD-EVENT and. and the referential situation in real world, i.e. WORLD SITUATION.. io. er. ANGENT-EVENT,. Nat. SITUATION REPRESENTATION. al. v i n C h also claim that theUSTRENGTH of prediction Chinese polysemous modal verb, we engchi n. Besides, according to the systematic account for different core meanings of each. represented by each polysemous modal verb to the POTENTIAL correspondence between SITUATION REPRESENTATION and WORLD SITUATION governs the ordering restriction in Chinese multiple-modal construction. This generalization of our alternative methodology in this study is also supported by the English double-modal construction in several English dialects, in which it implies our present framework is universal across languages.. ix.

(10) CHAPTER I Introduction. It has raised much attention how human expresses their emotion in daily conversation and how these expressions are interpreted and realized in utterances. For a thorough discussion of this issue, the concept of Modality has long been a major focus of interest for semanticists, grammarians, and philosophers (Lyons, 1977;. 政治大. Perkins, 1983; Coates, 1983; Palmer, 1990, 2001; Hofmann, 1993; Bybee et al., 1994;. 立. Bybee & Fleischman, 1995). As Palmer (2001) indicated, this semantic-grammatical. ‧ 國. 學. element expresses speaker’s opinion or attitude toward the proposition of utterance. ‧. and realized as different grammatical categories cross-linguistically, such as verbs,. y. Nat. er. io. al. sit. adverbs, adjectives, auxiliaries, etc.. n. If speakers are confronted with modal expressions in their native language,. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. especially those that contain a modal verb, they are immediately able to interpret these expressions as being either epistemic or non-epistemic. The question is what means enable the speakers to interpret these modal expressions accurately. Some may argue that the meaning of an utterance containing a modal verb is inferred from the meaning of the modal itself. What we need is just an appropriate way of accounting for the meaning of the modal verb in an utterance. In fact, Wu (2009: 50-58) points out that the modern Chinese modals are originally lexical verb but later have lost most their 1.

(11) 2. lexical meaning diachronically due to the process of grammaticalization so as to have acquired many semantic/pragmatic functions, namely they are polysemous. So it seems plausible that we can acquire the accurate modal interpretation by examining the insight of polysemous modal verbs. However, when we encounter multiple-modal construction (discussed in a later section), which can allow two or three modal verbs to co-occur in one sentence in Mandarin Chinese, we cannot solely depend upon the. 政治大. particular modal verb used but take the aspects beyond word level into consideration.. 立. Thus, in order to account for the fact that modal meaning is readily recognized as such. ‧ 國. 學. we should consider other factors that may control the selection of appropriate modal. ‧. al. sit. io. 1.1 Motivation and Purpose. er. Nat. different parts of the utterance.. y. interpretation, such as the syntactic environment or the semantic contribution of the. n. v i n In recent decades the modalCconstruction raised an extensive attention. h e n g calsohhas i U Much of the literature (Coates, 1983; Hofmann, 1993; Bybee et al., 1994; Heine, 1995) takes semantic or syntactic approaches to analyze the modal construction and observes that there are many similarities cross-linguistically. In terms of Chinese, various proposals have been made to account for how various modal interpretations are realized in syntactic structure (Chao, 1968; Li and Thompson, 1981; Lin and Tang, 1995; Tang and Tang, 1997; Huang, 1999; Huang, 2009). Among the several syntactic.

(12) 3. properties of Chinese modals, one is worth to be addressed: the multiple-modal construction. Unlike English, Mandarin Chinese allows the possibility of co-occurrence of modal verbs, as in (1): (1). a. *He can will come. b. 他應該會答應跟我們去旅行 ta yinggai hui he. daying. should would promise. gen women. qu luxing. with. go travel. us. 政治大. ‘It is supposed that he would be likely to agree to go traveling with us.’. 立. will should go school. al. qu shangxue. y. he. io. hui yinggai. sit. Nat. ta. ‧. (2) *他會應該去上學. er. ordering restrictions are at work, as in (2):. 學. ‧ 國. However, if we examine the multiple-modal construction closely, we can see some. n. v i n C h modal verbs U In addition, there exist some polysemous in Chinese modal system, such engchi as hui 會, neng 能, yao 要, yinggai 應該, keyi 可以. Because these polysemous modal verbs seem to encode multiple-layer of modality interpretation, it is plausible that there exist rich multiple-modal constructions in Mandarin Chinese. However, the data of Chinese modal adjacency shown in Huang’s (1999) study are very restricted and these polysemous modal verbs cannot be stacked in one sentence randomly. In early time, Chao (1968:609-610) argues that modal verbs can co-occur in one.

(13) 4. sentence. Such as hui yao會要, hui neng會能, hui ken會肯, keyi hui可以會, gai yao 該要, yinggai keyi應該可以, but he didn’t explain the ordering restriction of modal co-occurrence. Her (2008) assumes Chinese modal system has two dimensions: speaker-oriented and subject-oriented. He observes that speaker-oriented modals always precede subject-oriented modals. See the following examples: (3) *他能可能唱歌. 政治大 sing. ta neng. keneng changge. he. possible. can. 立. 學. ‧ 國. ‘It is possible that he can sing.’ (4) *他願意必須唱歌. sing. y. willing to must. changge. sit. bixu. Nat. he. yuanyi. ‧. ta. io. n. al. er. ‘It is obligatory that he is willing to sing.’. Ch. i n U. v. We can see the dynamic modals neng ‘can’ and yuanyi ‘willing to’ cannot occur. engchi. before either epistemic modal keneng ‘possible’ or deontic modal bixu ‘must’. He also further divided speaker-oriented into possibility and obligation while subject-oriented into volition and capacity. Tsao (1993) also generates some possible patterns of Chinese modal sequence: (5). 1. 2. 3A/B. epistemic(yinggai, keneng) + hui + deontic/dynamic (a) keneng+hui(1+2 or 1+3B).

(14) 5. (b) yinggai+keyi(1+3A or 1+3B) (c) hui+yao(2+3B) (d) yinggai+hui+ken(1+2+3B) Following Tsao’s (1993) generalization, Zheng (2001) adopts threefold classification of Chinese modal system and also has similar findings on Chinese modal sequence based on corpus-based approach. She observes the real usage of Chinese modal sequence can be generated into three basic patterns: epistemic+deontic,. 治政 epistemic+dynamic and deontic+dynamic. Guo (1994) 大 also claims that the order of 立 ‧ 國. 學. multiple-modal construction in Chinese is not arbitrary. The order should be epistemic>deontic>dynamic and Huang (1999) further argues the multiple-modal. ‧. construction logically has four variants of multiple-modal expressions as follows:. deontic > dynamic. n. al. er. II.. io. epistemic > deontic. sit. y. Nat. I.. Ch. III. epistemic > dynamic. engchi. i n U. v. IV. epistemic > deontic > dynamic In sum, these studies assure that there exists restriction of multiple-modal co-occurrence but what mechanism governs this ordering constraint is still needs to be discovered. Also currently we are not sure whether any modal verbs can randomly co-occur in one sentence. Therefore, what interests us is how one specific modal interpretation of.

(15) 6. polysemous modal verb is selected when filling in this construction. Though these previous studies have reached agreement that epistemic modal verbs and non-epistemic modal verbs are merged at different level, in which can provide a fundamental explication to multiple-modal construction in Mandarin Chinese, there is still very little consensus among them as to the best way to formulate a general representation to predict such modal adjacency restriction. As a result, in the present. 政治大. study we propose that such association is not arbitrary but may be restricted by some. 立. mechanisms, e.g. the interaction between linguistic semantics of each polysemous. ‧ 國. 學. modal verb and sentence pragmatics in this construction. So the goal of this thesis. ‧. aims to explore this correspondence between modal structure and modal interpretation. Nat. io. sit. y. in Mandarin Chinese so that we can find out a better solution to account for every. n. al. er. possible distribution of the multiple-construction of Chinese polysemous modal verbs. 1.2 Data Collection. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Most usages and wordings of examples in this thesis are extracted from two main Chinese corpora online: Academia Balanced Corpus and GigaWord Corpus. In Academia Balanced Corpus, the collected texts are classified based on five criteria: genre, style, mode, topic and source so it is representative enough of modern Chinese language. However, through the data extraction process, we find that the multiple-modal construction seldom occurs in Sinica Corpus. Therefore, for the.

(16) 7. validity of explicating the interaction between modal construction and modal interpretation, we extract more modal co-occurrence samples in GigaWord Corpus, which contains about 1.1 billion Chinese characters, including more than 700 million characters from Taiwan’s Central News Agency, and nearly 400 million characters from China’s Xinhua News Agency. For the sake of comparison and emphasis, some self-created sentences and examples in other studies are also included in this thesis. In. 政治大. addition, in the present study, the data source of all examples from corpus or other. 立. introspected if no data source specification.. 學. ‧ 國. literatures will be noted followed by the example. Otherwise, the instances are. ‧. 1.3 Outline of Thesis. Nat. io. sit. y. Chapter I gives the brief but insightful introduction of this study. Chapter II reviews. al. er. previous literatures on Modality issue including syntactic approach and. n. v i n semantics-pragmatics interface C approach. III explicates different modal U h e nChapter i h gc interpretations of Chinese polysemous modal verbs. Chapter IV accounts for the multiple-modal construction in Mandarin Chinese. Chapter V concludes this study..

(17) 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v.

(18) CHAPTER II Literature Review. In this chapter, we will mainly review two types of studies on Modality in Mandarin Chinese: a syntactic approach and a semantics-pragmatics interface approach. The syntactic studies investigate the syntax of modals within the framework of Chomskian approach while the semantic-pragmatic studies explore various senses. 政治大. of modal interpretation via the examination of interaction between intrinsic lexical. 立. semantics and structural implication of utterance. In the first part, we will begin with. ‧ 國. 學. the syntactic exposition and then point out their deficiency in capturing the insight of. ‧. Chinese modal system. Before going into the discussion of syntactic framework, we. Nat. io. sit. y. will first explicate the criteria of Chinese modal verbs for determining the final list of. er. Chinese modal verbs in the present research. In the second part, in terms of semantic. al. n. v i n and pragmatic research, we willC compare works done by U h e nthegdescriptive-oriented i h c Lyons (1977), Coates (1983) and Palmer (1990, 2001) with the relevance analysis postulated by Sweetser (1990), Klinge (1993) and Papafragou (2000). 2.1 Syntactic Approach 2.1.1 Syntactic Status of Chinese Modal Verbs Modality can be expressed by different syntactic categories. In English, for example, modality can be interpreted as modal auxiliaries such as may, might, and. 9.

(19) 10. should, in modal verbs such as assume or allow, and in modal adverbs such as possibly or certainly. In Chinese, on the other hand, Tang and Tang (1997) specify that Chinese modal system can be expressed in modal particles such as ba in ‘ta zou le ba 他走了吧’ and ne in ‘ni shuo hao bu hao ne?你說好不好呢?’ and in modal adverbs such as huoxu ‘maybe’ and dagai ‘perhaps’ and so on. However, their status and the criteria for identifying them are still controversial issues in Chinese linguistics. Some. 政治大. argue that Chinese modal verbs belong to verbs, but are different from full verbs (Lin. 立. and Tang, 1995; Tang, 2000); others argue that Chinese modals can precede full verbs. ‧ 國. 學. like adverbs or behave like auxiliaries between subject and predicate (Tsai and Porter,. ‧. 2008). None of them nonetheless can provide a holistic account for the syntactic. Nat. al. er. io. differentiating these categories in Chinese modal system.. sit. y. status of Chinese modal verbs. So we are wondering if there are any valid criteria for. n. v i n C hsuggest that modal verbs Li & Thompson (1981: 172-4) in Chinese are modal engchi U auxiliaries and they possess following features: A.. They do not take aspect markers.. B.. They cannot occur before the subject as English modals do in question.. C.. They cannot be nominalized.. D.. They cannot be modified by intensifiers, such as hen很, geng更.. As for the above criteria, some problems arise. For example, we don’t agree with the.

(20) 11. criterion D as there are many counterexamples to refute this claim. For instance, in this sentence 這個人很能吃苦 Zheigeren hen neng chiku ‘This person is capable of taking hardship’, the intensifier hen很 modifies the modal verb neng能. Xiaoming bi Xiaoli genghui change 小明比小李更會唱歌 ‘Xiaoming can sing better than Xiaoli’, in this sentence, intensifier geng更 modifies the modal verb hui會. Ni bi ta gengneng chiku 你比他更能吃苦 ‘You can bear more ordeals than he’, in this sentence, the. 政治大. intensifier geng更 modifies the modal verbs neng能. On the other hand, Tang (2000). 立. pointed out that in traditional syntactic analyses, modal verbs and modal adjectives. ‧ 國. 學. are “auxiliaries”. They listed seven syntactic characteristics of modal verbs and. ‧. adjectives in order to differentiate them with modal adverbs in Chinese. These. io. sit. y. Nat. include:. They can appear alone in an answer or a predicate.. B.. v i n C h forms and can beUnegated. They can have A-not-A question engchi. C.. They can be the focus in a cleft sentence and appear after shi是.. D.. When they are predicates, they can appear in ‘shi……de’ construction and be the. n. al. er. A.. focus when nominalized. E.. Modal adjectives can be modified by intensifiers and they can appear in comparative structures.. F.. They can appear either before or after a negative adverb..

(21) 12. G.. They can coexist with other similar or different kinds of modal verbs or modal adjectives.. These criteria seem to be quite reasonable compared to Li and Thompson. However, Tang didn’t make a clear separation between modal verbs and modal adjectives in his paper. On the contrary, both of them have the same syntactic status based on his analysis. In addition, the existence of adjective category in Mandarin Chinese is. 政治大. disputed (Huang, 2008). Thus, we accept his criteria for Chinese modal system but. 立. only admit that there only exists the category of modal verbs and modal adverbs in. ‧ 國. 學. Mandarin Chinese. In what follows, we adopt the above criteria and make a detailed. ‧. Nat. io. sit. modal verbs and common verbs. y. comparison among common verbs and modal verbs and modal adverbs:. er. I. Modal verbs must be used in the construction “ModV + V + N”, not “ModV +. al. n. v i n N”. That is to say, modal verbs C cannot nominal object, while common verbs can. h etake ngchi U Sentences (6a) and (7a) are acceptable, whereas (6b) and (7b) are not. (6) a. 他能開車 Ta. neng. kai. che.. He able to drive car “He is able to drive a car.” b. *他能車.

(22) 13. Ta. neng. che.. He able to car “*He is able to car” (7) a. 你會寫字 Ni. hui. You able to. xie. zi.. write. words. “You are able to write words.” b. *你能字 Ni. neng. zi.. You. able to. words. 政治大. 學. ‧ 國. 立. “*You are able to words.”. ‧. II. Modal verbs cannot combine with the aspect markers of –le了,- zhe著,- guo過.. Nat. io. sit. y. In other words, they do not allow the construction “ModV + le/zhe/guo + V” while. er. common verbs can allow the construction “V + le/zhe/guo + V”. Hence, sentence (9). n. al. i n Csentence is ungrammatical in Chinese, but (8) is acceptable. hengchi U (8) 他學過唱歌 Ta xue-guo He. learn-ASP. chang. ge. sing. song. “He has learnt to sing.” (9) *他能了唱歌 Ta He. neng-le can-ASP. chang. ge. sing. song. “He has become able to sing”. v.

(23) 14. III. Modal verbs cannot be reduplicated, while common verbs can: (10) a. 你想想再做決定 Ni xiangxiang zai. zuo. jueding. You think think then make decision “You think carefully and then make a decision.” b. *你想想去台北 Ni xiangxiang. qu. Taipei. Taipei 治政大 “You want to go to Taipei.” 立 You want want. go. ‧ 國. 學. Xiang in sentence (10a) is a common verb, so it can be reduplicated; xiang in sentence. ‧. (10b) is a modal verb, so it cannot be reduplicated.. sit. y. Nat. IV. Modal verbs can be modified by the intensifiers, while common verbs cannot:. n. al. He. hen/feichang. He. very. er. io. (11) a. 他很/非常會唱歌 hui chang. Ch. can. e n gsong chi. sing. “He can sing very well.” b. *他很/非常唱歌 He He. hen/feichang chang very. sing. “He sings very well” (12) a. 他很/非常能講故事. ge. ge song. i n U. v.

(24) 15. Ta. hen/feichang. He. neng. very. jiang. be able to. gushi. tell story. “He is capable of telling the story very much.” b.*他很/非常講故事 Ta. henfeichang. He. very. jiang. gushi.. tell. story. “He tells the story very well.”. 政治大 Some linguists claim that modal verbs can precede full verbs like adverbs because 立. modal verbs and modal adverbs. ‧ 國. 學. those function words that can only act as adverbial modifier are adverbs. Thus,. ‧. “ModV + V” construction is analyzed as the modifier-head structure. Actually, the. sit. y. Nat. following characteristics show that both of them have different syntactic properties:. n. al. er. io. I. Modal verbs can be directly negated by the negative adverbs bu ‘not’, fei. Ch. i n U. v. ‘improperly’, while adverbs cannot. Bu can only occur before neng as in (13b),. engchi. not before dangran as in (13a), because neng is a modal verb, dangran ‘of course’ is an adverb. (13) a. *我們不當然能告訴他這個事實 Women bu We. dangran. neng. not certainly can. gaosu. ta. zheige. shishi. tell. he. the. truth. “We certainly cannot tell him the truth.” b. 我們當然不能告訴他這個事實.

(25) 16. Women dangran bu We. certainly. neng. gaosu. not can. tell. ta zheige. shishi. he. truth. the. “We certainly cannot tell him the truth.” II. Modal verbs can appear alone as a reply to questions, while adverbs cannot. (14) a. — 他會說英文嗎? Ta. hui shuo. He. can. yingwen. speak. ma?. English. Q-marker. 政治大. “Can he speak English?”. 立. b. — 會. ‧ 國. 學. Hui. Can. ‧. “Yes, he can”. y. Nat. lai. ma?. awill l. come. Q-marker. n. hui. He again. Ch. “Will he come again?”. engchi. er. hai. io. Ta. sit. (15) a.— 他還會來嗎?. i n U. v. b.— *還 Hai again “*Again” To sum up the above analysis, we can formulate four criteria for generating the category of Chinese modal verbs1:. 1. Here we claim that the candidates of Chinese modal verbs do not have to exhibit all of these four.

(26) 17. I. Modal verbs must take predicate object. II. Modal verbs cannot be reduplicated. III. Modal verbs cannot be suffixed by -le, -zhe, -guo aspects. IV. Modal verbs can be modified by the degree of adverbs, such as hen ‘quite’, geng ‘even more’, feichang ‘extremely’, and they can also be negated by negative adverbs, such as bu, fei.. 政治大. We contend that Chinese modal verbs are subclass of common verbs and they. 立. have their own syntactic characteristics, which are different from common verbs and. ‧ 國. 學. modal adverbs. It is helpful for us to have a deeper understanding of criteria for. ‧. differentiating these categories in Chinese modal system. Thus, according to the. Nat. io. sit. y. above discussion we can list typical Chinese modal verbs as follows: hui 會, neng 能,. al. er. yao 要, gan 敢, ken 肯, xiang 想, dei 得, yinggai 應該, keyi 可以, nenggou 能夠, yuanyi. n. v i n 願意, keneng 可能, bixu 必須. C In the present study, weUwill follow Wu’s (2009) study hengchi to focus on polysemous modal verbs, hui 會, neng 能, yao 要, yinggai 應該, keyi 可以, for investigating their modal interpretation and co-occurrence. 2.1.2 Generative Approach on Chinese Modals As for the discussion on syntactic analyses, two types of categories are identified: lexical category and functional category. Lexical categories provide the descriptive. criteria. The more characteristics the Chinese modals confirm to these criteria, the more they belong to typical modal verbs; otherwise, they belong to non-typical modal verbs..

(27) 18. content and the basic argumental structure, whereas functional categories determine the grammatical specifications such as Tense and modality. They contribute to the determination of the interpretation and the form of linguistic expressions. In what follows we will specially focus on the previous Chinese modal literatures relating to these two analyses and then contend why both of them cannot fully explicate the nature of Chinese modal system.. 政治大. In terms of the lexical analysis of Chinese modals, Lin and Tang (1995) argue that. 立. modals in Chinese can be analyzed as raising and control verbs, because modals can. ‧ 國. 學. occur in the sentence-initial and sentence-final position. See the following examples. bu. gan. shuijiao. y. ]]]]. er. io. sit. Zhangsan. 不 [VP 敢 [CP[IPPROi 睡覺. Nat. (16) [IP 張三 i. ‧. they indicate:. not. n. sleep a l dare v i n C “Zhangsan dare not sleep.” h e ngchi U Zhangsan. (17) ‘You shouldn’t do it this way.’ a. [IPNeg[VPMODAL[CP[IP …. ]]]]. 不. 應該. 你. 這樣. Bu. yinggai. ni. zheyang zuo. not. should. you. this way. b. [IP[CP[IP 你. 這樣. do. 做] i ] 不 [VP 應該 ti ]]]. ni zheyang zuo you. 做. this way do. bu. yanggai. not. should.

(28) 19. c. [IP 你 i 不 [VP 應該 ni bu you. [CP[IP ti. 這樣做. ]]]]. yanggai. zheyangzuo. should. this way do. not. Lin and Tang (1995) Under the derivational framework, they propose the structure in (16) for the control type modals and (17a) for the raising type modal. Both types take a CP as the complement. When the complement raises, sentence (17b) with modals in the final. 政治大. position is derived while sentence (17c) in which the subject raises to the IP-Spec. 立. position is yielded if the CP is infinitive. According to such derivation, Lin and Tang. ‧ 國. 學. (1995) capture the possibilities with modals in the sentence initial position, sentence. ‧. final position and the position between the subject and the predicate. So it is predicted. y. Nat. al. n. lexical verbs that take a CP as the complement.. Ch. engchi. er. io. sit. that all modals can be in the sentence initial and final positions since modals are. i n U. v. However, this expectation cannot be a generalization of Chinese modals as Hsu (2004) argued in his study. First, although some modals may occur either in sentence initial or sentence final position in daily conversation, not all modals can behave in this way (*hui mingtian xiayu ma? ‘Will it rain tommorow?’). Such word order is also regarded as marginal by many native speakers, e.g. % keyi Zhangsan bu qu shangke ‘Zhangsan is not required to go to school’. Moreover, Lin and Tang (1995) also argue that their lexical category analysis is mainly based on the proposition that it is quite.

(29) 20. uncommon for an INFL element to occur in sentence final position. Nevertheless, in English, the modal auxiliary will as an INFL element is possible to occur sentence finally, e.g. ‘They said he may tend to leave and tend to leave he will’. Also given by their assumption, all modals can occur sentence finally; however, only YINGGAI ‘should’ and KEYI ‘may’ are allowed to occur in sentence final position even they are marginal and restricted in A-not-A form while other modals do not. Such analysis. 政治大. overgeneralizes the marginal possibilities to every Chinese modal and the discussion. 立. above all doubt on Lin and Tang’s (1995) argument.. ‧ 國. 學. On the other hand, instead of treating all epistemic modals as raising verbs and all. ‧. deontic modals as control verbs, Lin and Tang (1995) indicated that not all deontic. Nat. io. sit. y. modals are control verbs so that they suggest a more detailed division for deontic. er. modals. They argue that speaker-oriented deontic modals such as yinggai ‘should’ and. al. n. v i n C hepistemic modals and keyi ‘may’ should accompany with be separated from other engchi U subject-oriented modals such as neng ‘can’ and hui ‘be able to’. It is because these speaker-oriented deontic modals do not impose selectional restriction on subjects as other subject-oriented modals do. Thus, they claim that (18b) involves a raising-type deontic whereas (18c) involves a control-type deontic. (18) a. [他i [可能/應該 [ti吃過飯了]]] [tai [ keneng/yinggai [ti chi guo fan le]]] he may/should. eat-ASP rice ASP. (Raising type epistemic modals).

(30) 21. ‘He may/should have resigned. b. [書i [可能/應該 [ti 漲價了]]]. (Raising type deontic modals). [shui [keneng/yinggai [ti zhangjia le]]] book. may/should. raise-price ASP. ‘The price of books/the book may/should have been raised.’ c. [他i [敢/願意/能 [PROi 吃飯]]]. (Control type deontic modals). [tai [gan/yuanyi/neng [ PROi chi fan]]] he. dare/will/can. eat rice. ‘He dare/will/can eat rice.. 立. 政治大 (Lin & Tang 1995: 72). ‧ 國. 學. However, Hsu (2004) argued that lexical verb analysis is not the only way to account. ‧. for the selectional properties of dynamic modals in (18c). Analyzing modals as. y. Nat. al. er. io. sit. functional categories can also be compatible with such selectional restrictions. For. n. example, the English modal auxiliary can has the same property as shown in (19):. (19) *The door can break.. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Sentence (19) is only tenable when the door uses his “leg” to break something but it is not a common case. In other words, modals in English also pose selectional restrictions on their subjects even if they are treated as functional categories. Therefore, this kind of thematic property does not have to be a lexical property as argued by Lin and Tang (1995). To sum up, the analysis of modals as raising and.

(31) 22. control verbs leads to the wrong prediction of Chinese modal verb distribution. Hence, the discussion above shows that the analysis of modals as raising and control verbs does not hold. In terms of functional analysis of Chinese modals, on the other hand, Hsu (2004) proposed that Chinese modals should be divided into three-level modality layers reflected in the clausal hierarchy with the help of facts from preverbal adverb, the. 政治大. cleft shi, the particle suo, the Aspect system in Chinese, and the non-finite clauses and. 立. passivization2. Thus, there are projections of modals split in the INFL domain as. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. shown in (20):. (20) The tree structure of Chinese modal construction. sit. n. al. er. io. EpistemicModP 3. y. Nat. TP 3. Spec. Ch. EpiModP’ 3. Necessity/ Possibility. i n U. engchi. v. DeonticModP 3 Spec. DeModP’ 3 Deontic. DynamicModP 3 DyModP’ 3 Dynamic. vP. Huang (2009) also has similar assumption that Chinese modal system only has 2. See Hsu (2004: 40-58) for more detailed discussion of these evidences in favor of split INFL hypothesis..

(32) 23. two categories: modal auxiliaries and modal adverbs. They are all directly merged in distinct functional projections in syntactic structure and there exists a rigid hierarchy among modals, thus accounting for the sequencing constraints on multiple-modal occurrence. This approach though seems to provide a resolution to the wrong prediction raised by Lin and Tang (1995) and better account for the order restriction of these three modal expressions, some problems still remain. Both studies only. 政治大. hypothesize the existence of such functional projection and define the syntactic. 立. position of modal auxiliaries depending on the interaction of other syntactic elements. ‧ 國. 學. such as different layers of modal adverbs and aspect marker le2 (Huang, 2009: 45-56).. ‧. Nevertheless, they do not explain how this hierarchy is motivated and what enables. Nat. io. sit. y. the rigid Epistemic>Deontic>Dynamic sequence. Such hierarchy also cannot predict. er. some semantically unacceptable modal co-occurrences. Consider the following. n. al. examples:. Ch. engchi. i n U. (21) ‘You will be able to earn much money.’ a.. 你會能賺大錢 ni hui you. neng. will can. zhuan earn. da-qian much-money. b. ?你能會賺大錢 ni. neng. hui. you. can. able to. zhuan earn. da-qian much-money. v.

(33) 24. hui and neng are polysemous modal verbs and they both possess deontic and dynamic expression. In (21a) hui and neng are interpreted as deontic and dynamic expression respectively due to prediction of such hierarchy and occupied on their defined position as in (20). However, the same situation in (21b) results in semantically unacceptable modal co-occurrence for most people. Huang (2009: 79-81) also admits his analysis wrongly predicts the multiple-construction of obligation. 政治大. modals bixu/yinggai-yao and bixu/yinggai-dei3.. 立. 2.2.1 Descriptive-oriented Approach. 學. ‧ 國. 2.2 Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Approach. ‧. Many semantic criteria have been proposed for the definition of modality. Due to. Nat. io. sit. y. its complexity, it is hard to give a simple and clearly definable description.. al. er. Nevertheless, according to Hsieh (2005), it is generally accepted by Lyons (1977:. n. v i n C hto the speaker’s point 452) that Modality basically refers of view or mental attitude engchi U toward propositions. It conveys the propositional judgments through interpretations such as evaluative, probability, possibility and necessity. The following studies on Modality are also based on Lyons’ definition. Palmer (2001) presents a more general survey of modality as a typological category. He draws attention to the subjective nature of modality, and thereby defines it as ‘the grammaticalization of speakers’ 3. At the very beginning Huang adopted VP-fronting and VP-ellipsis tests in which these two can be only licensed by modal auxiliaries but not by modal adverbs. However, the result of which bixu/yinggai-yao passes the tests whereas bixu/yinggai-dei fails forced him to treat dei is a modal adverb, which is contradictory to general intuition..

(34) 25. attitudes and opinions’. Bybee and Fleischman (1995) also attempt to characterize modal systems cross-linguistically. Their argument treated the concept of modality and that of proposition separately: when the proposition of an utterance in the most neutral semantic status, i.e. factual or declarative, is subject to further additional meaning, this extensive interpretation is modality. Lyons (1977) further divides modality into two types: deontic and epistemic. The. 政治大. term “epistemic” comes from Greek meaning knowledge while “deontic” is related to. 立. the imposition of obligations. Generally speaking, epistemic modality is concerned. ‧ 國. 學. with the notions of possibility and necessity while deontic modality is related to. ‧. permission and obligation. However, Coates (1983) argues against Lyon’s system in. Nat. io. sit. y. which it does not cover concepts such as ability and volition. Thus Coates redefines. al. er. deontic as “root modality” including the concepts of obligation, permission, ability,. n. v i n C h Lin and Tang (1995) volition and so on. In terms of Chinese, adopt Lyon’s twofold engchi U classification of modality while T. Tang and C. Tang (1997) adopt Coates’ version in which “root” refers to deontic modality. On the other hand, Palmer (1990:36) divides modality into three types: dynamic, deontic, and epistemic. Dynamic modality has to do with the ability or volition of the subject of the sentence; deontic modality is related to the attitudes of the speaker while epistemic modality is related to speakers’ knowledge of the world. Tsao (1990).

(35) 26. also adopts such division. Similarly, Hsin (2000) divides Southern Min modality into three-parts: speaker-oriented modality, epistemic, and subject-oriented modality, corresponding to the threefold division of Palmer. Though we have two different classifications on modality system, the twofold classification of modals in Mandarin Chinese seems too simple to capture the modal properties while threefold classification can properly represent the semantic and. 政治大. syntactic characteristics of modals. Consider the following examples:. 立. Zhangsan yinggai. duo. nianshu. Zhangsan. hard. study. should. 學. ‧ 國. (22) a. 張三應該多唸書. ‧. ‘Zhangsan should study hard.’. y. Nat. io. sit. 書應該漲價了 shu. yinggai. zhangjia. book. should. raise-price ASP. n. al. Ch. er. b.. le. engchi. i n U. v. ‘The price of books should have been raised.’ c.. 我可以讓你贏這場球賽 wo. keyi. rang. I. can. let. ni. ying. you. win. zhechang qiusai this-CL ball game. ‘I can let you win this ball game.’ d. 這包米可以讓你吃一整個星期 Zhe-bao. mi. keyi rang. ni. chi. yi-zhenge. ‘This package of rice can let you eat for a whole week.’. xinqi.

(36) 27. e. 張三肯離開 Zhangsan ken. likai. ‘Zhangsan is willing to leave.’ f. *桌子肯離開 Zhuozi. ken. likai. ‘*The desk is willing to leave.’ (23) a. 張三很會跳舞 Zhangsan. hen. hui. tiaowu. 政治大. ‘Zhangsan is very good at dancing.’. 立. Zhangsan. hen. hui. 學. ‧ 國. b. *張三很會離開 likai. ‧. ‘It is very possible for him to leave.’. hen. io. al. y. yinggai duo. sit. Zhangsan. nianshu. er. Nat. c. *張三很應該多唸書. v. n. ‘It is very supposed to be the case that he studies hard.’. Ch. d. *張三很可以早點回家 Zhangsan. hen. keyi. i n U. engchi zaodian. huijia. ‘Zhangsan is permitted to go home earlier.’ We can see both epistemic and deontic modals don’t have selection restrictions on their subjects ((22a-d)) and cannot be modified by adverb hen ((23b-d)), but dynamic modals in (22e-f) and (23a) have both properties. Therefore, it seems that it is necessary to take dynamic modality into consideration in Mandarin Chinese..

(37) 28. Additionally, based on the observation of ancient Chinese data, Wu (2009) claimed that the core meaning of polysemous modal verbs should be the modal senses of ability and volition and later developed deontic and epistemic senses in synchronic semantic extension. In short, epistemic and deontic modal expressions have been shown cross-linguistically to have been developed from dynamic modal expression (Bybee et al. 1994).. 政治大. Accordingly, based on the discussion of descriptive-oriented approach on. 立. classification of Chinese modality, the two-type classification, epistemic and. ‧ 國. 學. non-epistemic, seems to not fully reflect the differences among Chinese modals.. ‧. Instead, dynamic modality should be regarded as one individual category in Chinese. Nat. io. sit. y. modal system. Thus, in the current stage three-type classification can better capture. al. er. the fact of modals in Chinese. This view is also agreed with Wu’s (2009) study in that. n. v i n C2006) she adopted Hsieh’s (2002, 2005, then proposed a modified U h e npostulation i h gc semantic classification which is further grouped into two primary categories: root and epistemic as (24) shows: (24) Modality Classification of Chinese Modals (Wu, 2009:33).

(38) 29. Ability Dynamic Volition Root Modality Commissive Deontic. Modality. Directive. Epistemic Judgmental 治政大 Though the modality classification system seems not to be unified across languages, 立 Epistemic Modality. ‧ 國. 學. here we still at least identify three major modal expressions in Chinese modal system. ‧. as follows: epistemic modality refers to a class of interpretations involving the. sit. y. Nat. speaker’s attitude or opinion toward the status of the truth of a proposition while. n. al. er. io. deontic modality involves permission or obligation with respect to some authority or a. Ch. i n U. v. set of moral values. Dynamic modality evaluates the occurrence of events or the. engchi. existence of will, capacity, ability and volition.. To sum up, descriptive-oriented approach to the systematic meaning multiplicity of modals is to assume massive lexical ambiguity, that is, each polysemous verb encodes a particular cluster of distinct modalities. Although the fundamental point of this approach is the rigid distinction between epistemic and various non-epistemic meanings of the modals, this view still faces several problems as indicated by.

(39) 30. Papafragou (2000). The most important one is that the characteristics of modals cannot be compared parallel to the phenomenon of classical lexical ambiguity. Consider the lexical ambiguity exemplified by port in (25) and the multiple senses of modals in (26). (25) This port is justly famous. (26) a. Mary can speak German.. 政治大. b. Mary can speak German at the meeting because everybody will. 立. understand.. ‧ 國. 學. (Papafragou, 2000:23). ‧. The port in (25) could indicate either a harbor or a type of strong, sweet red wine.. sit. y. Nat. And each sense of port is distinct and clear-cut. However, the semantic senses of the. n. al. er. io. modal can in (26) overlap since the subject-oriented modality is subsumed under the. Ch. i n U. v. dynamic modality. Another methodological problem that a descriptive approach. engchi. encounters, as criticized by Klinge (1993), is that different analysts’ work on modality basically depending on his/her own paraphrases. Typical instances that Klinge (1993) analyzes are represented as (27) and (28): (27) a. You must be very careful. b. You are obliged to be very careful. (28) a. You must be very careless. b. It is obvious that you are very careless..

(40) 31. Klinge (1993: 316-317) Sentences (27b) and (28b) are paraphrases of (27a) and (28a) respectively. These paraphrases provide the researchers with a reasonable clue of the meaning of must. The paraphrase (27b) picks out one meaning of must as “obligation” whereas (28b) illustrates another meaning of must as “logical conclusion.” The meanings of must concluded from these paraphrases seem to be perfectly reasonable. On the other hand,. 政治大. suppose what if another grammarian comes up with another set of paraphrases as (29b). 立. and (30b).. ‧ 國. 學. (29) a. You must be very careful since you are able to paint such delicate. ‧. picture.. sit. y. Nat. b. It is obvious that you are very careful.. io. al. er. (30) a. You must be very careless so that we can scare the guests off. n. once and for all.. Ch. engchi. b. You are obliged to be very careless.. i n U. v. Klinge (1993: 316-317) These two examples are similar to (27) and (28) except for the later parts of the sentence. The meaning this grammarian could get from (29b) and (30b), however, seems to be just the opposite of what we have seen in examples (27) and (28). What has been exemplified in instances (27)-(30) is the recurring problem previous studies have faced: the lack of a principled account of how we arrive at separate.

(41) 32. interpretations of sentences containing modals. Therefore, it is suggested by Papafragou (2000) that the traditional categories of modality classification are effectively ‘by-products’ of the comprehension process perceived by different pragmatic functions rather than stable and basic semantic information guiding pragmatic interpretation. 2.2.2 Polysemy Approach. 政治大. Lexical polysemy, the ambiguity of an individual word that can be used in. 立. different contexts to express two or more different meanings, has long been an. ‧ 國. 學. interesting area to researchers of various theoretical persuasions. Heine (1995). ‧. suggests that “in many languages, agent-oriented (deontic) and epistemic meanings. Nat. io. sit. y. are expressed by means of one and the same expression.” This generalization implies. al. er. that the various senses of one modal form incline to perform as polysemy, which. n. v i n C h In what follows,Uwe will review some previous means these senses are closely related. engchi studies in which they claim that various functions or senses usually do not happen to correlate with one single linguistic form without reasons. One of the proposals upon polysemy analysis is Frame-based approach postulated by Fillmore et al (1992), which refers to ‘a structured background of experiences or beliefs, constituting a conceptual requirement for understanding the meaning of a word’. In other words, a frame is determined by our background knowledge and.

(42) 33. experience with the lexicon, that is, a lexical meaning is identified by a structured cognitive schema in our mind. Thus, polysemous words are put into different frames which highlight different frame elements, namely participant role or arguments. The relations among the frames (word senses) are not connected to one another directly but are associated with the amount of shared frame elements. Based on this notion, Fillmore built a frame-based online dictionary in which different senses of. 政治大. polysemous words are linked to various cognitive structures, namely frames so that he. 立. differentiates two senses of the verb RISK which are RISK as ‘put at risk’ and RISK. ‧ 國. 學. as ‘face the risk of’ by identifying their occurrence within different syntactic. ‧. structures. Liu and Wu (2004), following Fillmore et al (1992), provided one of. Nat. io. sit. y. earliest studies discussing Mandarin polysemy respect to Frame-based approach.. al. er. Instead of explaining what is the way meaning extending, they have shifted the focus. n. v i n Cdifferent to investigating the distinction of of a U polysemous word in corpus. h e n senses i h gc They define the senses of polysemous word via different syntactic behaviors corresponding to basic patterns in FrameNet. Sweetser (1990:3) points out that “if a language has (as does English) a systematic use of the same vocabulary for root and epistemic modality, we may conclude that, within the language’s system, these two classes of senses are closely linked.” Based on Talmy’s (1988) notion of ‘force dynamic’ as a basis for the semantics of the.

(43) 34. modals, Sweetster places her discussion of modality within polysemy analysis in natural language. She also adopts Cognitive Linguistic framework and further contends that polysemy is often motivated by metaphorical mapping from the concrete, external world of socio-physical experience to the abstract, internal world of reasoning and of mental processes in general as (31) shows. (31) Metaphorical Extension from Root to Epistemic Modality. 立. Socio-physical world. ‧. ‧ 國. Possibility. 學. Permission. 政治大 Mental world. In other words, we tend to use one single linguistic form from the external. Nat. io. sit. y. (socio-physical) domain in speaking of the internal (emotional and psychological). al. er. domain. Metaphor, thus, is one crucial source that can be used for the examination of. n. v i n C h On this assumption, what motivates form-function mappings. she postulates that there engchi U is a regular metaphorical mapping between the two domains: root and epistemic, i.e. it has been conventionalized. Sweetser concludes that an account based on ‘modality in two worlds’ could explain the historical priority of the root over the epistemic meanings of the modals as similar to Wu’s (2009:66) exposition in her study4. Although Sweetser correctly moves in the direction of supplying motivation for 4. Wu (2009) concludes that the development from dynamic modality to deontic modality is motivated by the cognitive mechanism of subjectification (Traugott 1989) while the path of development from deontic modality to epistemic modality is motivated by a metaphorical mapping between the external socio-physical world and the internal mental world (Sweetser 1990)..

(44) 35. the systematic relation between root and epistemic uses of modal expressions, this approach still confronts some problems as indicated by Papafragou (2000). First, the semantics of perception terms, e.g. see and view, includes a metaphorical mapping which relates two independent and distinct senses. However, in the case of modals, these senses linked through metaphor are not so distinct as we have demonstrated in (26). Consequently, even if we assure there exists transparent metaphorical mapping. 政治大. in the case of perception verbs, the same mapping applied to modals is not very. 立. straightforward. Second, the historical development of modal verbs cited by Sweetser. ‧ 國. 學. (1990), namely the precedence of the root over the epistemic sense, is not all. ‧. unquestionable (Goossens, 1982). Some other researches also find the opposite data. Nat. sit. n. al. er. io. 1982).. y. which show that the epistemic uses have already existed in Old English (Shepherd,. Ch. 2.2.3 Context-derived Approach. engchi. i n U. v. This approach adopts a common core for the meaning of each modal, and uses it as a basis for deriving the vast range of possible interpretations which the modal’s meaning may contextually receive. Modality, in such an approach, generally allows us to compare the real world with hypothetical versions of it. Deontic modals propose a match between an ideal moral or a legal situation and the real world of behavior whereas epistemic modals express different strengths of prediction of their match.

(45) 36. between hypothetical situations and the real world. Recent researchers, Papafragou (2000) for example, adopting a similar approach but further, taking a pragmatic perspective, claims that the range of different interpretations of modals can be derived in context. In other words, this view regards modals as context-dependent expression in that they depend on inferential pragmatic processes to complement the information they need. In what follows we will first introduce Relevance theory developed by. 政治大. Sperber and Wilson (1986) and then Klinge’s (1993) framework upon context-derived. 立. approach.. ‧ 國. 學. Relevance Theory. ‧. Sperber and Wilson (1986) assume that linguistic semantics of a sentence. Nat. io. sit. y. represents a coded stimulus that gives access to and activates a determinate set of. al. er. concepts. Generally, the concepts activated are used by an addressee as an assumption. n. v i n C h form capable ofUmental representation that can schema to arrive at a full propositional engchi be subject to further processing. This means an informative stimulus is relevant to an individual to the extent that it causes cognitive effects for that individual. Such cognitive effects can be generated into three types: (a) the stimulus may interact with previously held assumptions to yield new implication (contextual implications); (b) the stimulus may contradict an existing assumption and result in its elimination from the addressee’s space; (c) the stimulus may offer support for an existing assumption.

(46) 37. and result in its strengthening in the addressee’s mental space. Thus, during the process of understanding an utterance, the addressee is often faced with a choice between several interpretations (SITUATION REPRESENTATION as Klinge (1993) call it), all of which are compatible with the linguistically encoded content of the utterance (PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT which Klinge (1993) refers to in his work). In the framework of Relevance theory, therefore, the hearer is justified in treating as the. 政治大. correct interpretation that satisfies his/her expectation of relevance. This is exactly an. 立. interpretation which the speaker has expected to be best relevant to the addressee. So. ‧ 國. 學. the whole process of utterance comprehension can be illustrated as follows: once. ‧. hearing an utterance, the addressee starts to construct sets of mentally representative. Nat. io. sit. y. assumptions which might interact with his/her mental representation of the utterance.. al. er. The set of representative assumptions constitute what Sperber and Wilson call the. n. v i n C h with the mentalUrepresentation of the utterance context and will be processed together engchi to yield tentative interpretive hypotheses. These hypotheses then will be examined by the hearer’s expectation of relevance. Klinge (1993) Adopting Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) Relevance theory upon utterance comprehension, Klinge (1993) aims to propose a unified account of how these five typical English modals- can, may, will, shall and must - derive various multiple modal.

(47) 38. senses respectively. The basic assumption Klinge (1993) takes is that the linguistic semantics of a sentence is accessed and activated by a set of concepts. Generally, sentences can be arranged based on two different types of linguistic semantic information: (32) OPERATORS [PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT] What we have is a place for one or more OPERATORS and the other place for PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT.. 政治大. The relationship between these two is that the. 立 is governed, or modified, by the. PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. while the. ‧ 國. 學. OPERATOR. OPERATOR. is not part of the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. This can be captured by. ‧. saying that the OPERATORS have SCOPE over the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. These. y. Nat. er. io. sit. two different concepts also contain different linguistic semantics. The “conceptual information” that is capable of aencodes iv l C n U In other words, the linguistic h ea SITUATION representing the concepts that go into n g c h itype.. n. PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. semantics of the constituents of the sentences provides an input to the formation of an idea about one SITUATION. On the other hand, OPERATOR encodes what we may call “procedural information” specifying how the conceptual information carried by the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. is to be processed. That is to say, this part is secondary to. the completion of a sentence and signifies how the speaker wants to process the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. by means of tense, aspect, sentence types or modality..

(48) 39. Klinge (1993) also reminds that linguistic semantics is severely “underspecified”. What this implies is that the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT of a sentence is determinate and remains constant, but the ideas of a SITUATION evoked from the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. are not constant. A SITUATION is inconstant because it is subject to the. inferential process taken by the addressee. The addressee derives the optimal explanation of a given sentence by combining the conceptual information of the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. 政治大. and assumptions inferred from the SITUATION. Klinge. 立. (1993) calls this inferential situation a WORLD SITUATION. The modal’s contribution. ‧ 國. 學. to the interpretation of an utterance is thereby to provide correspondence between the. ‧. proposition expressed (what Klinge (1993) calls the SITUATION REPRESENTATION). Nat. io. sit. y. and an actual state of affairs (what he calls a WORLD SITUATION).. al. er. Back to modal expression, modal, being an operator, provides the PROPOSITIONAL. n. v i n C h information. Klinge CONTENT with necessary procedural (1993) assumes that a modal engchi U doesn’t report a focus event per se but only the relation of that event so that modals share commonly the semantic meaning of POTENTIALITY. The elements of POTENTIALITY. work as follows: the POTENTIAL is an assumption about a WORLD. SITUATION. which is not verified. One resolution of the POTENTIAL is that the WORLD. SITUATION. turns out to be the case while the other resolution is that the WORLD. SITUATION. turns out not to be the case. This can be demonstrated as follows:.

(49) 40. (33) Processing Model toward Utterances Containing Modals. WORLD SITUATION POTENTIAL ~WORLD SITUATION Based on the principles mentioned above, we can borrow MODAL to stand for any modals and use the following example as illustration:. 政治大. (34) a. John MODAL buy Mary’s ticket.. 立. b. MODAL [JOHN BUY MARY’S TICKET]. ‧ 國. 學. The MODAL represents POTENTIALITY and gives PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. ‧. procedural information. Since the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT provides input to the. al. y. sit. io. SITUATION REPRESENTATION.. the elements of POTENTIALITY are applied to the The role POTENTIALITY that plays is to assume that the. er. Nat. SITUATION REPRESENTATION,. n. v i n SIUTATION REPRESENTATION isC not to be true of a WORLD SITUATION. In hasserted engchi U other words, it only signals that there is a POTENTIAL that the SITUATION REPRESENTATION. turns out to be a true description of a WORLD SITUATION.. Consequently, this leads to two logical resolutions: whether it turns out that the SIUTATION REPRESENTATION. is a true description of a WORLD SITUATION, or it turns. out that the SIUTATION REPRESENTATION is not a true description of a WORLD SITUATION.. “It is this potential correspondence between the SITUATION.

(50) 41. REPRESENTATION. and a WORLD SITUATION that is the shared semantic field of the. modals as OPERATORS (Klinge, 1993: 325).” In short, Modal has the PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT. and thereby the SITUATION REPRESENTATION in its SCOPE and the. correspondence between the SITUATION REPRESENTATION and a WORLD SITUATION as its semantic field. 2.3 Remarks. 政治大. In Section 2.1, we have addressed the generative approach, either lexical analysis. 立. or functional analysis leads to an overgeneralization to modal verb distribution and. ‧ 國. 學. fails to explain what motivates the ordering restriction of multiple-modal construction. ‧. if solely depending on syntactic approach. Instead, we should take the. Nat. io. sit. y. semantic/pragmatic factors into consideration. Thus, back to our indication in the very. al. er. beginning, the present study aims to formulate a schematic representation of modal. n. v i n Cexplicate form-meaning correspondence to mechanism governs the selection of U h e n gwhat i h c modal interpretation within sentences containing multiple modal verbs so that several research questions are raised: I.. How the following three-layer modal expressions: epistemic, deontic, and dynamic, are captured in the multiple-modal construction, for instance, the involvement of context information or unspecified semantic source5?. 5. This term ‘semantic source’ is defined by Hsieh (2005, 2006) in which refers to the reference of judgment and obligation addressed..

(51) 42. II.. In light of the principled account for each polysemous modal verb’s different functions which are derived contextually, how can we specify the regularity to various possible modal co-occurrences?. In Section 2.2, three different semantic-pragmatic approaches are elaborated for the further discussion upon multiple modal interpretations of sentences containing modals. Although the discussion so far seems to be that either descriptive-oriented approach or. 政治大. metaphorical mapping approach cannot give a perfect exposition for modals, both of. 立. them still achieve some initial observation toward the insight of polysemous modal. ‧ 國. 學. verbs. In the next chapter, context-derived approach will be mainly applied to. ‧. examine how each Chinese polysemous modal verb serves to produce a different. Nat. n. al. Ch. engchi. er. io. the WORLD SITUATION in a given context of utterance.. sit. y. constellation of potential correspondence between a SITUATION REPRESENTATION and. i n U. v.

(52) CHAPTER III Semantics-Pragmatics Analysis of Polysemous Modal Verb. In the last chapter, we have addressed some drawbacks of traditional descriptive-oriented approach in which we cannot achieve a unified account for various modal interpretations, either epistemic or non-epistemic, within sentences containing modals. Instead, we assume that each modal possesses a core meaning for. 政治大. specifying how the proposition is processed thereby deriving a vast range of modality. 立. interpretation in a given context. Also, as illustrated by Klinge (1993) in the last. ‧ 國. 學. chapter, the modal represents POTENTIALITY to operate on linguistic semantics at the. ‧. sentence level and indicate it is only a POTENTIAL that the SITUATION. y. Nat. io. sit. is a true description of WORLD SITUATION. Therefore, as we adopt. al. er. REPRESENTATION. n. most fundamental concept of Klinge’s (1993) framework in the present study, we. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. argue that the various modal interpretations of each polysemous modal verb in Mandarin Chinese are inter-connected. In what follows we will first introduce the inference process of how a sentence containing a modal is comprehended. 3.1 The Resolution to Unverified WORLD SITUATION Since modals only indicate it is only a potential that the SITUATION REPRESENTATION. truly describes WORLD SITUATION, this unverified SITUATION. REPRESENTATION. can be proved valid toward future WORLD SITUATION via two ways: 43.

(53) 44. either the naturally occurring event in the world produces a WORLD SITUATION that verifies the SITUATION REPRESENTATION or someone, either the speaker or other unspecified sources (e.g. law and morality), intentionally produces an effect to induce a WORLD SITUATION that verifies SITUATION REPRESENTATION. In Klinge’s (1993) argument, the former is regarded as WORLD-EVENTS in which it signals the happening of SITUATION inferred from PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT and the later as AGENT-EVENTS. 政治大. in which it happens if someone intentionally chooses to induce it.. 立. Thus, when encountering an utterance of a sentence containing a modal, we may. ‧ 國. 學. possibly go through two separate inference processes suggested by Klinge (1993) as. y. Nat. io. al. relates to a future WORLD-EVENT, I will assume that the. n. REPRESENTATION. sit. If my speculation about the WORLD SITUATION described by the SITUATION. er. I.. ‧. follows:. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. course of the world will determine whether a WORLD SITUATION corresponds with the SITUATION REPRESENTATION. II.. If my speculation about the WORLD SITUATION described by the SITUATION REPRESENTATION. relates to a situation in that an activity is intentionally. produced to give rise to an AGENT-EVENT, I will assume that this intentional activity, either motivated or not motivated by the agent himself/herself, will determine whether a WORLD SITUATION corresponds with the SITUATION.

(54) 45. REPRESENTATION.. When we consider the following sentence, for instance, (35) Mary may come in. it is traditionally taken to be ambiguous as epistemic or deontic at the level of the modal lexeme. In the alternative analysis, however, these two modality interpretations are actually derived from different conceptions of the SITUATION REPRESENTATION. 政治大. that the sentence brings about because of assumptions about the WORLD SITUATION in. 立. separate event types. Thus, a hearer confronted with (35) will automatically regard. ‧ 國. 學. this SITUATION REPRESENTATION conveyed by the speaker as an unverified future. ‧. al. or the activity of intentional force onto the agent, i.e. an. n. AGENT-EVENT.. io. WORLD-EVENT,. is verified either by a naturally occurring event, i.e. a. sit. Nat. SITUATION REPRESENTATION. y. On the basis of speculation about WORLD SITUATION, s/he will determine this. er. EVENT.. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. In other words, the addressee would compare the unverified. proposition MARY BE IN with her assumption about the course of world or an agent’s intentional activity. Eventually, this framework ‘ensures that no disambiguation of the modal lexeme is required and the correct interpretation is automatically arrived at’ (Klinge, 1993:329). Therefore, with this principled exposition, we can re-visit the three-layer modal expression addressed in Section 2.2.1 within this alternative methodology represented as follows:.

(55) 46. . Epistemic (POSSIBILITY, PREDICTION, GENERIC) A WORLD-EVENT with no agent control inferred. . Deontic (OBLIGATION, PERMISSION) An AGENT-EVENT motivated by the obligated or permissive source. . Dynamic (VOLITION, ABILITY) An AGENT-EVENT motivated by the agent himself/herself. In what follows we will examine how these expressions are derived in Chinese. 政治大 verb and the propositional concept conveyed by sentences based on this 立. language via the interaction between linguistic meaning of each polysemous modal. ‧ 國. 學. semantics-pragmatics interface approach.. ‧. 3.2 Modal Interpretation of Polysemous Modal Verb. sit. y. Nat. 3.2.1 YINGGAI 應該. n. al. er. io. Two modal interpretations assigned to YINGGAI are detected in corpus: OBLIGATION. Ch. i n U. v. and PREDICTION. Both of which are frequently used and thus are quite. engchi. uncontroversial. See the following examples: PREDICTION. (36) 北京方面真正在意的應該還是台灣獨立的趨向. (Sinica Corpus). Beijing. fangmian zenzheng zaiyi. de yinggai. haishi Taiwan. Beijing. side. PRT possible. still Taiwan. really. duli. de. quxiang. independence. of. tendency. care. ‘It is possible that what Beijing (government) really cares is the tendency of.