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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 25:2 (2024) ► pp.234–269

The semantics of Mandarin futurates

| Beijing Language and Culture University

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.

Keywords: simple futurates, modality, aspect, tense & tenselessness
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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 2 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00154.he
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