The semantics of Mandarin futurates
This paper investigates future interpretations in Mandarin declarative root clauses without overt future modals,
i.e., Mandarin futurates. Mandarin futurates require future time adverbs and schedulable eventualities, which denote future
readings relative to the utterance time or a context-determined past time. Moreover, Mandarin futurates presuppose the existence
of a plan in the context and are incompatible with a single perfective aspect marker le1
. To account
for these facts, I argue that a covert future modal m-plan is present in futurates and extend the formal analysis for
English simple futurates to Mandarin with necessary modifications.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Properties of Mandarin simple futurates
- 2.1Constraints on eventualities
- 2.2Obligatoriness of future time adverbs
- 2.3Presupposition of the existence of a plan
- 2.4Constraints on the evaluation time
- 2.5Interaction with overt aspect markers
- 2.6Interim summary
- 3.The semantics of Mandarin simple futurates
- 3.1English simple futurates: Copley (2009) & Rullmann et al. (2022)
- 3.2Interaction between future interpretations and aspect
- 3.2.1The cross-linguistic picture of aspect in future contexts
- 3.2.2Previous accounts
- 3.2.3The proposal
- 3.3The analysis for Mandarin simple futurates
- 3.4Differences between m-plan and hui ‘will’
- 4.Implications on the debate of tense
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Akal, Taylan
2024.
Plain and Progressive Futurates in Turkish.
Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 18:1
► pp. 110 ff.

He, Yuyin
2024.
Finiteness in Mandarin clausal complements: the role of ICH and future modals.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics 33:2
► pp. 259 ff.

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