Non-root modals for the past and temporal shifting in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper has two major goals. First, it provides a detailed empirical description of how the epistemic and metaphysical readings of the “non-root modal + Perf(ect) have” construction in English (e.g., John might have won the game yesterday) are expressed in Mandarin Chinese. The two readings both involve non-root modals for the past, i.e., non-root modals with either a past temporal perspective or a past temporal orientation. Certain languages express the two readings via manipulating the scope relation between the modal and the perfect aspect. In this paper, I show that Mandarin Chinese, by contrast, resorts to the presence/absence of such aspectual adverbs as 仍 reng ‘still’ and 还 hai ‘still’, to determine the reading of non-root modals for the past. Second, I propose that aspectual adverbs like reng and hai are operators that can back-shift the temporal perspective of a non-root modal from the speaker’s utterance time to a past time. The back-shifting gives rise to a metaphysical reading of the non-root modal. In spite of surface differences, English and Mandarin Chinese actually employ similar strategies in expressing metaphysical modality with a past temporal perspective.