The Semantic Category Of Irrealis

This dissertation is a further development on the basis of my M.A's paper The Semantic System of Modal Verbs in Modern Chinese. During the four years of my study for PH. D diploma, I have been keeping a keen interest on the modal verbs and modality and found the modality meaning is far from which modal verbs can convey. We need different angles and on higher levels to deepen the research of Chinese semantic system. In this paper I tried to divide the events into realis and irrealis categories. The so-called grammatical rules executes normally in the realis category, while an amount of exceptions exist in the irrealis category.This paper consists of nine chapters and about 140,000 words altogether.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the terms Realis and Irrealis. Realis refers to those situations that have occurred or are occurring, while Irrealis refers to those situations that not occurred or be not sure whether can occur, the speaker has not provided and do not prepare to provide any evidence neither to verify the occurrence of the event. Irrealis includes all the situations except realis proposition by extension.Chapter 2 probes into the different criteria in dividing realis and irrealis meanings. It argues that there should be three criteria to divide realis and irrealis: time, sentence pattern, and modality. From the angle of time, phase, aspect takes less effects on judging which proposition is realis and which one is irrealis rather than the absolute time system. Future relates to irrealis naturally and the non-future relates to realis on the other hand. But non-future can correlate with irrealis as well under suitable conditions. From the angle of sentence pattern, interrogatives, exclamatives and imperatives belong to irrealis category defaulted, while the contrast between realis and irrealis exist only in declaratives. From the angle of modality, sentences with epistemic modality markers are sure to be inside irrealis, but still part of those without epistemic marks belong to irrealis category, which need to analyze with the attendance of the element time .Chapter 3 discusses further on the basis of chapter 2 about the future event. There is no tense category although in Chinese, future time occurs with events. The basic semantic feature of future events is uncertainty, which relates closely to modality. As a consequence of it, future events are usually expressed by modality markers. Chapter 4 illuminates intensively how the pre-verbal parts take effects on prepositional modality. Most of the modality markers expressing irrealis propositions are epistemic modality. In Chinese, there are some types of expressing epistemicmodality------modal verbs, modal adverbs, phsycoverbs etc, all of which take theposition before verbs. At the same time, some markers used to express or emphasize realis occupy the pre-verbal position as well.Chapter 5 is dedicated to the relation between negative and prepositional modality, mainly in the issue whether negation has crucial influence on prepositional modality. It discusses as well how the two negative markers in Chinese "bu" and "mei" take effect. Negation takes effect on clauses, rather than verb phrases. Negation doesn't belong to modality category, thus it will not change the quality of the original proposition, which means, if the original positive proposition is realis proposition, then the negative one is realis as well; if the original one is irrealis, and then the negative one is irrealis as well. In Chinese, "bu" takes responsibility of negation to irrealis propositions, while "mei" to realis ones, which is the selective consequence of irrealis and realis propositions respectively.Chapter 6 discusses habitual category in Chinese, including its definition, its status in linguistics, the semantic features of it, expressing forms and frequency difference between habitual markers. Habitual is a hybrid category in linguistics, partly belongs to tense category, partly belongs to aspect, and partly belongs to modality. Habitual has three main semantic features as: reduplication, consistency and regularity. Both vocabulary and grammatical structures can express habitual meaning, besides, default marker or combined markers of vocabulary and grammatical structures can express habitual event as well. Different habitual markers may express different frequency, but above middle-level normally. The default-marked habitual event may choose markers with different frequency according to its need.Chapter 7 focuses on the issue how short-distance and long-distance affect the event quality. The definition "short-distance" and "far-distance" in physical spaces may influence events quality through metaphorical analogical effect. This chapter focuses on three groups of words "zhe" and "na", "wo", "ni" and "ta", "xialai" and "xiaqu". On the degree of grammaticalization, "na", "ta", "xiaqu" are more grammaticalized than "zhe", "ni" and "xialai" respectively. To express it briefly, long-distanced representation is easier to be grammaticalized than short-distanced one. The degree of grammaticalization may map into the degree of irrealis. One can see the influence force that distance may influence the degree of irrealis meaning from the grammaticalization of these three groups.Chapter 8 is a try to analyze the phenomenon in Chinese with the irrealissemantic system, with the object verb reduplication structure------ restricts to "W"structure only. We found that W tends to appear in irrealis events through mass data survey of "kankan"(to look), "wenwen"(to ask), "shuoshuo"(to say), which are three of most frequently-used verbs in Chinese, more precisely, imperative sentences are prominent in those irrealis situations with Kankan, wenwen or shuoshuo. However, four groups of elements could influence the quality of events with structure "W", which are positive/ negative, definite object/ indefinite object, presence/ non-presence, with description/ without description. Generally speaking, the structure VV could not be negated, but it could be possible under irrealis situations. If the object of VV is indefinite-referential, the event with it expresses irrealis meaning; but it is not necessarily true in reverse, that is to say, the event is not necessarily realis with a definite-referential object. Presence is a property closely related to imperatives. The tendency that VV applied to imperatives makes the property presence prominent, with which we can explain why "kankan san ben shu" (to read read three books) is unacceptable but "kankan zhe san ben shu" (to read read these three books) does. The predicate with description expresses realis meaning, while it expresses irrealis meaning without descriptions. These four groups of elements could take different effects on the quality of events with VV, furthermore, they could compete with each other and usually the part in the left of the sentence could win out. However, presence is kind of unique for it is a supra-clause parameter and is supposed to be analyzed in contexts.Chapter 9 is a brief conclusion to this paper. It reviews the issues related to irrealis in this paper, firstly the connotation and extension of irrealis. Irrealis has a generality as a semantic category in the world-wide languages. Secondly introduces how time, sentence patterns, modality work in dividing realis and irrealis. This chapter reviews the syntactic expressions of irrealis category as well. Furthermore, it describes the relations between negative and propositional modality, distance and event quality etc. it reviews the habitual issue as well, the problem inbetween realis category and irrealis category. At the end of this paper,we point out that there are still some deficiencies and some issues need to be further improved, the exclamative words and subjunctive for example.