The Semantics Of Xinghao In Mandarin Chinese

Traditionally,xinghao(??)is taken as a modal adverb,specifically,an evaluative(EADV)that expresses the speaker's attitude towards a proposition or an event(Zhang Yisheng 2000,2002).It is conventionally assumed that xinghao describes a situation where a potential negative result of an event is avoided due to a certain favorable condition(cf.LüShuxiang 1999:586).Most scholars have provided a detailed discussion of its syntactic behaviors and pragmatic functions(Fang Hong 2003;Yang Yiming and Xu Yizhong 2004;Tang Ning 2005;Gao Shugui 2006;Ding Jie 2007;Zou Qingmei and Yuan Surong 2015),yet the research into xinghao's semantics needs to be further investigated.Empirical evidence shows that xinghao exhibits modal features,and its interpretation involves a judgment of fortunateness and an inference from evidence or knowledge.It is also observed that xinghao describes a factual proposition which is compared with a hypothetical situation at the speaker's evaluative state.However,these modal features of xinghao cannot be elaborated within the traditional approach.Therefore,in order to capture its modal meanings,this paper develops a formal semantic analysis for xinghao based on comparative semantics and scalar analysis.This thesis argues that xinghao involves the speaker's judgment of fortunateness towards an actual result with reference to predicted results at the time of utterance.Building on modal semantics on possible worlds,it is assumed that xinghao has an epistemic modal base f and a bouletic ordering source g,which contribute to the interpretation of xinghao.In addition,this paper claims that the evaluative content of xinghao denotes a non-veridical meaning that is relative to the subjunctive mood.Based on this modal meaning,it is proposed that xinghao is a subjunctive mood operator that establishes a comparison of its argument p with the non-veridical alternatives in context,and that there exists a mapping relation between propositions and a set of ordered degrees on the scale of “fortunateness” triggered by xinghao,where the actual result has a degree value higher than the predicted negative result.In other words,to claim xinghao p means that the speaker believes that there is at least an alternative in context which is less preferred than p.Apart from its scalar property,xinghao is also regarded as a focus-sensitive operator similar to zhi “only” and cai “just” that affect the truth of a sentence via triggering a set of different alternatives pragmatically.The proposed generalization offers a new perspective for exploring the semantic properties of xinghao and can be extended to the study of other evaluative modal adverbs.Moreover,it associates xinghao's modal features with the choice of subjunctive mood to examine how these factors are combined to contribute to the meaning composition of xinghao at the semantics-pragmatics interface.