Abstract
The Mandarin Chinese modal particle de has several interesting aspects to explore in formal semantics. Its interpretations include ability, disposition, and opportunity modalities. The three uses are all universal quantifiers. This paper focuses primarily on the ability use. This use has an agentivity requirement on the de subject. The semantics for ability de given in this paper makes reference to an enhanced Belief–Desire–Intention agent model and nicely captures the agentivity requirement. Ability de is incompatible with a past-denoting temporal phrase, except when the temporal phrase associates with certain focus sensitive elements or otherwise receives focus intonation. I argue that the general incompatibility of ability de with a past-denoting temporal phrase stems from the semantic requirement that the topic time of an ability de sentence should coincide with or follow the evaluation time of de, which is the utterance time by default. On the other hand, there are temporal shifters which can backward-shift the evaluation time to the topic time and as such, salvage otherwise ungrammatical ability de sentences that contain a past-denoting temporal phrase. The paper also discusses, albeit to a lesser extent, the disposition and opportunity uses of de.
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Xie, Z. The modal uses of de and temporal shifting in Mandarin Chinese. J East Asian Linguist 21, 387–420 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-012-9093-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-012-9093-8