Polarity and the diachronic development of deontic modality in Chinese

Abstract

In this paper, first instantiations of deontic modality in Archaic Chinese (Early Archaic Chinese EAC, 10^th – 6^th c. BCE, and Late Archaic Chinese LAC, 5^th – 2^nd c. BCE) are at issue. Deontic expressions predominantly include synthetic modal negative markers and verbs of possibility in combination with negation and in rhetorical questions; i.e. they are closely related to polarity. In this brief study, a syntactic analysis of deontic modal readings mainly in LAC will be proposed. The discussion is inspired by Cormack and Smith (2002), who propose a polarity head, which distinguishes a Modal1 connected to necessity readings and a Modal2 connected to possibility readings.