On the Topography of Chinese Modals

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive cartographic account of the modality spectrum in Chinese. It becomes clear from our study that the complicated relation between modals and modality calls for a more articulated theory of the organization of functional projections: More specifically, epistemic modals occupy the complementizer layer, deontic modals the inflectional layer, and dynamic modals the lexical layer. Moreover, we provides an explanation of certain cases of actuality entailments in Chinese modals from a typological point of view, in that Chinese develops a more analytic strategy to represent the scope relation between modals and other sentential operators, i.e., by merging an operator where it should be.

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