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Article published In:
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Vol. 7:1 (2020) ► pp.1–44

Possibility and necessity and the scope of negation in Early Middle Chinese

| National Tsing Hua University

This paper provides a classification of modal verbs of possibility and necessity in Late Archaic and Early Middle Chinese based on an analysis of their scopal features with respect to negation. It shows that circumstantial readings and deontic readings are interpreted in two different syntactic positions which can be determined by the scope of negation following the cartographic approach proposed in Tsai (2008, 2015) and the proposal of Cormack and Smith (2002) of a Polarity Head, which constitutes a syntactic divide of the domain of necessity modals from the domain of circumstantial modals. Our analysis of the scope of negation demonstrates that the deontic interpretation of possibility modals requires their upward movement from the lexical to the functional domain as part of the grammaticalization process from pre-modal lexical verbs to modal auxiliaries of different functions in Modern Mandarin. In Early Middle Chinese, negated modal verbs of possibility start to replace the synthetic modal negators of Archaic Chinese as part of the general process of analyticization of Chinese. We also show that the only true necessity modals in Late Archaic Chinese belong to the category of circumstantial modals due to their scopal features when they are negated.

Keywords: Late Archaic, Middle Chinese, Modal verbs, Negation, Scope, Grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The proposal
  • 2.Prohibition and negation in Late Archaic Chinese
    • 2.1Synthetic modal negation in Chinese
    • 2.2The syntactic position of the deontic negative markers
    • 2.3Negation in LAC and the syntactic position of bù 不
    • 2.4Double negation in Chinese
  • 3.Modal verbs in combination with negation
    • 3.1Possibility modals + neg
      • 3.1.1 neg + mod poss
      • 3.1.2 mod poss + neg
      • 3.1.3 neg+mod poss+neg
      • 3.1.4Summary mod poss+neg
    • 3.2 mod deontic + neg: The modal verbs dang 當 ‘should’, ying 應 ‘ought/should’
      • 3.2.1 neg + mod deontic
    • 3.3 neg+mod deontic+neg
      • 3.3.1Summary: mod deontic+neg
    • 3.4 neg+mod necessity: bi 必 ‘necessary, must’ and xu 須 ‘need’
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.19013.mei
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