| Summary: | 博士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 103 === The aim of this dissertation is to provide an empirically driven, theoretically informed investigation of how speakers of Chinese Languages which are used mostly in Taiwan, namely Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Southern Min, express knowledge about the world around them. Three main issues are discussed: (i) epistemic modality, in which we focus on the three modality expressions in Mandarin Chinese—yiding ‘mustepi.’, yinggai ‘shouldepi.’, and keneng ‘be likely to’, (ii) propositional attitude verbs, in which we take phah4-sng3 ‘intend; think’ in Taiwanese Southern Min as an example, and (iii) discourse particles, in which the two maximizers in Taiwanese Southern Min, tshian1-ban7 and tsuat8-tui3, and the sentence-final particle de in Mandarin Chinese are investigated. These three issues, though distinct, are actually related with respect to evidentiality, the notion not restricted to the expression of ‘evidence’ per se but used in a broader sense to involve attitudes towards knowledge and truth (Chafe 1986).
The first part of this dissertation is devoted to the investigation of the syntax and semantics of modal evidentials. The second part is contributed to non-modal evidentials in Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Southern Min, viz. attitude verbs and discourse particles. The two types of evidentials roughly correspond to a distinction between propositional and illocutionary evidentials, defined by the level of meaning they operate on. However, evidentials which have a static semantics (e.g. they are epistemic modals) may implicate other kinds of meaning in conversation, operating on an illocutionary level. The epistemic modal yinggai ‘shouldepi.’ in Mandarin Chinese is such an example.
In the first part, I argue that among the three modals, yiding ‘mustepi.’, and keneng ‘be likely to’ are propositional evidentials and yinggai ‘shouldepi.’ is an illocutionary evidential. The properties of the three modal evidentials rendered them hierarchically ordered. I argue that this ordering can be attributed to two distinct semantic factors—the quantificational force of evidentiality ( or ) over evidential-belief worlds, and a coordinate of speaker intention (see Giorgi 2009) in the semantics of yiding ‘mustepi.’ but not in that of yinggai ‘shouldepi.’. The syntactic statuses of the three modals also constitute another crucial key to the puzzle about their distinct evidential behavior and the hierarchical ordering.
In the second part, I discuss the issue of attitude verbs as evidentials with a case study of phah4-sng3 ‘intend; think’ in Taiwanese Southern Min. I show the multiple functions of phah4-sng3, and argue that it derives the use as a propositional attitude verb from the intentional-verb use, and becomes a slifting verb, which is regarded as an evidential, expressing epistemic propability and lowering the epistemic threshold. Moreover, I deal with the issue of discourse particles. I take the sentence-final particle de in Mandarin Chinese and tshian1-ban7 and tsuat8-tui3 in Taiwanese Southern Min as case studies. I argue that de is a CP-type discourse particle, operating on the illocutionary level of meaning. It has two opposite discourse functions—antithetic and emphatic, contributing to the non-at-issue content. In addition, tshian1-ban7 and tsuat8-tui3 (in its deontic use) are treated as IP-type discourse particles. They are argued to display twofold behavior, selecting the jussive clause types on the one hand, and modifying the directive force of these clauses on the other.
The two levels of meaning (i.e. propositional and illocutionary) may interact in a sentence. This is shown in discussing the discourse particles in question. I argue that the sentence-final particle de in Mandarin Chinese cooperates to generate the sense of counterfactuality with the weak necessity modal yinggai ‘ought’ or other modals that can derive an alternative reading like yinggai ‘ought’, and that tshian1-ban7 and tsuat8-tui3 (in its deontic use) in Taiwanese Southern Min show a concord relation with the modal required in the same sentence.
This propositional-illocutionary distinction suggests a multidimentional model of meaning (cf. Scheffler 2009, Potts 2012), whereby sentence meaning is modeled by the at-issue dimension, and the rest, which constitute the non-at-issue dimension (viz. the Conventional Implicature dimension).
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