What is it about?
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.
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Why is it important?
This article offers the first detailed formal semantic analysis for future interpretations in Mandarin declarative root clauses without overt future modals, i.e., Mandarin futurates. It contributes to the cross-linguistic investigations on simple futurates in languages with independent differences in their tense/aspect systems.
Perspectives
The differences between English futurates and Mandarin futurates suggest that the restrictions on simple futurates differ in languages that do not have a contrasting progressive form for future time reference. Future research should therefore investigate simple futurates in a variety of other languages, including those with independent differences in their tense/aspect systems (Rullmann 2022). This paper makes an effort towards this direction and advocates more cross-linguistic exploration to better understand the universals and variations.
Yuyin He
Beijing Language and Culture University
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This page is a summary of: The semantics of Mandarin futurates, Language and Linguistics 語言暨語言學, February 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lali.00154.he.
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