Lecture | CHiLL series
“De” outside the cleft: An evidential operator in the C domain
- Date
- Wednesday 20 March 2024
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.23
Abstract
Little is known about the function of the particle de as a sentence-final particle (SFP; as opposed to its relativizer/nominalizer function) in Mandarin Chinese, as in zhe gongzuo henshihe ni DE ‘Actually, this job is very suitable to you’. In this talk, I will present a syntactic and semantic analysis of de’s SFP use in an attempt to characterize de’s structural position and meaning contribution. Building upon previous analyses (Paul 2015, Pan 2015), I argue that the SFP de heads an evidentiality projection at the lower Mandarin CP level, critically assuming that the Mandarin CP layer is head-final (Tang 1988). Moreover, in relation to the proposed syntactic position I proceed to argue that the SFP de encodes the speaker attitude qua an evidential operator. Its primary semantics, used in frequent association with the evidential adverbial specifier qishi ‘actually’, is to specify that its prejacent proposition holds true, and simultaneously at least one of the typical indicative circumstances that normally come along with the proposition does not hold true. I further clarify that the evidential use of de is distinct from a second lexical entry of the de-particle used in the focus-marking shi...de construction, which I argue resides in a lower syntactic position and associates with a distinct assertive meaning. Besides filling in the void of existing research on East Asian sentence-final particles from a syntactic perspective, the current study sheds further light upon the subtle semantic contribution of a special class of evidential marker as delineated against other ontological categories of speaker-oriented meaning such as speech act modifiers.