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Contrastive topic, zhiyou, and cai-conditionals

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Abstract
It is well known that the Mandarin preverbal scalar particle cai, when occurring in a conditional construction (cai-conditional), expresses a necessary condition (the truth of the antecedent proposition is necessary for the truth of the consequent proposition). However, there are several puzzles about cai-conditionals, including whether cai itself contributes to the necessity semantics and how to best analyze the co-occurrence of cai and the exclusive-like expression zhiyou ‘only’ in the antecedent clause. This paper advances a semantic account according to which the conditional cai represents a special exhaustivity operator that is sensitive to contrastive topic instead of focus. This operator asserts its prejacent conditional and the exclusion of subquestions which have a positive answer, except the one already answered positively by cai’s prejacent. Zhiyou is then analyzed as an operator presupposing scalar highness. This paper shows how this proposal captures a question-under-discussion requirement of cai-conditionals and the co-occurrence between cai and zhiyou.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Starting point: An analysis of zhiyou-conditionals
    • 2.1Summary of Wimmer (2022)
    • 2.2Interaction with quantificational modals/adverbs
    • 2.3A QUD requirement of zhiyou-conditionals
  • 3.Towards a CT-based account
    • 3.1Proposal at a glance
    • 3.2F-marking or CT-marking?
    • 3.3The semantics of cai-conditionals
    • 3.4Zhiyou as high
  • 4.Concluding remarks and remaining issues
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
References (40)
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