Modality and aspect and the thematic role of the subject in Late Archaic and Han period Chinese: obligation and necessity

Meisterernst Lingua Sinica (2017) 3:10 DOI 10.1186/s40655-017-0027-2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Open Access Modality and aspect and the thematic role of the subject in Late Archaic and Han period Chinese: obligation and necessity Barbara Meisterernst Correspondence: Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany Abstract In this paper, the interplay of modal markers with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese is at issue. Abraham and Leiss (Modality-aspect interfaces: Implications and typological solutions, 2008) propose a strong and possibly universal relation between the verbal aspect and either the root/deontic or the epistemic reading of a modal verb based on data from the Germanic languages. In this article, this hypothesis will be checked against the data of Late Archaic and Early Middle (Han period) Chinese. It will be proposed that a relation similar to that in the Germanic languages can also be established for Chinese at least for the root modal values, despite the obvious differences between the aspectual and modal system of Chinese and that of the Germanic languages. As in the Germanic languages, root modal verbs in general select verbs/predicates which are compatible with the perfective aspect, i.e. [+TELIC] verbs. Due to the fact that epistemic readings have not developed yet for modal auxiliary verbs, the constraints proposed in Abraham and Leiss for the epistemic reading of modal verbs in combination with imperfective or [−TELIC] verbs cannot be confirmed for LAC and EMC. Epistemic modality is expressed by sentential adverbs which take an entire proposition as their complement. These are less confined in their selectional restrictions than modal auxiliary verbs. Keywords: Modality, Aspect, Lexical aspect, Thematic roles, Late Archaic and Han period Chinese 1 Background In this paper, the AM (aspect-modality) system in Late Archaic (fifth–second c. BCE) and Early Middle (first c. BCE–sixth c. CE), specifically in Han period Chinese (206 BCE–220 CE), will be discussed. The paper proposes a strong relation between root modal markers and the lexical [+TELIC/TERMINATIVE] aspectual features of the embedded VP (verb phrase) in LAC (Late Archaic Chinese) and EMC (Early Middle Chinese); thus, it provides some evidence for the hypothesis on universal relations between aspect and modality proposed in Abraham and Leiss (2008).1 In an earlier paper, Meisterernst (2016a) argued that aspectual distinctions in LAC rather concern the lexical than the grammatical aspect. Accordingly, the present discussion focusses on the relation between the lexical aspect and modal readings in LAC and EMC. The system of modal markers and its diachronic development in Chinese has continually gained more interest in the linguistic literature (see Li 李明 2001; Liu 刘利 2000; © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Meisterernst Lingua Sinica (2017) 3:10 Meisterernst 2008a, 2008b, 2011; Peyraube 1999 for LAC and for diachronic studies, and e.g. Alleton 1984; Li 2004 for Modern Chinese). The same holds true for the diachronic development of the aspectual system, i.e. the development of the source structures of the aspectual markers of Modern Mandarin on the one hand, and for the constraints, the lexical aspect imposes on the employment of aspectual markers not only in modern but also in LAC and Han Chinese on the other (Aldridge and Meisterernst 2017; Cao 曹广顺 1999; Jiang 蒋绍愚 2001, 2007; Jin 金理新 2006; Mei 梅祖麟 1980; Meisterernst 2015a, 2016b). However, systematic relations between modality and aspect, which according to Abraham and Leiss (2008) are frequently not even established in well-studied languages, have hitherto not found much interest in diachronic and synchronic studies of Chinese. The present paper focuses on the system of aspect and modality in LAC and Early Middle (Han period) Chinese, one of the important transition periods of Chinese, in order to establish the basic constraints of the interplay between aspect and modality in preModern Chinese. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the theoretical background and the diachronic development of aspectual and modal features in Chinese will be discussed. In Section 3, the proposed hypothesis will be checked against the root modal verbs of Late Archaic and Han period Chinese; in Section 4, the conclusions drawn from the discussion will be presented. 2 An introduction to aspect and modality 2.1 The interrelation of aspect and modality In this section, the theoretical background of the discussion as it has been proposed in Abraham and Leiss (2008) will be introduced. Abraham (1991) observes dependencies between the reading of a modal verb and the aspectual features of the embedded infinitival complement in the Germanic languages: ‘- modals combine with lexically perfective infinitives in order to generate deontic meaning (DMV) - modals combine with imperfective infinitives in order to generate epistemic meaning (EMV) (1) a. He must leave now. (DMV/*EMV) ≠ b. He must be leaving now. (*DMV/EMV) c. He must give money to them. (DMV/*EMV) ≠ d. He must be giving money to them. (*DMV/EMV) (Leiss 2008: 17) This observation among others results in Abraham’s and Leiss’ proposal (2008: XIII) that – Perfective aspect is compatible (‘converges strongly’) with root modality – Imperfective aspect is compatible (‘converges strongly’) with epistemic modality.2 – Negated clauses as a rule select imperfective aspect only, without necessarily yielding epistemic modality. This classification accounts for the fact that root modals, i.e. deontic modals in a wider sense, take an event as their complement, whereas epistemic modals take a proposition as their complement: root modals are event modifiers (Abraham and Leiss 2008: XX). This has Page 2 of 35 Meisterernst Lingua Sinica (2017) 3:10 been evidenced by Abraham (2009: 265) with German modal verbs for which epistemic readings are difficult to obtain with telic [+TERMINATIVE] verbs, whereas both deontic and epistemic interpretations are possible with atelic [−TERMINATIVE] verbs. The feature [+/−TERMINATIVE] rather refers to aktionsart features, i.e. the lexical aspect of the verb/ predicate, than to the grammatical, i.e. the perfective and the imperfective aspect of the VP.3 Lexical aspect is characterized by the semantic feature of telicity or boundedness which refers to the natural initial and final points of a situation. States and activities are atelic or unbounded (non-terminative in Abraham’s terminology), neither the initial nor the final points of the situation are included in their temporal structure; th (...truncated)