Sinica venetiana

The Factuality Status of Chinese Necessity Modals

Exploring the Distribution Via Corpus-Based Approach

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Abstract

This paper is intended to test the deontic vs anankastic hypothesis outlined by Sparvoli 2012. The stipulation is that, in past contexts, deontic modals trigger a counterfactual inference, while anankastic modals (here called ‘goal-oriented modals’) either trigger an actuality entailment effects (‘only possibility’ modals) or a generic non-factual reading (‘mere necessity’ modals). The result of this corpus-based study conducted in a Chinese-English parallel corpus confirm the crucial role played by the deontic vs goal-oriented contrast in the marking of factuality in Chinese and shows that the factuality value decreases across a cline from goal-oriented to deontic modals.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: March 4, 2020 | Accepted: Oct. 14, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Actuality entailment • Deontic modality • Counterfactuality • Goal-oriented modality

Copyright © 2020 Carlotta Sparvoli. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-406-6/005


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