City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
A Formal Study on ‘keneng’ and ‘yiding’
Presented by
Miss TANG Lili
PhD candidate, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
City University of Hong Kong
Date: 12 September 2008, Friday
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Venue: B7516 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
The epistemic operators yiding and keneng, and more specifically their translation equivalence must and may, have been described as quantifiers over possible worlds: yiding/must quantifying universally and keneng/may existentially (e.g. Dowty 1979; Kratzer 1977, 2002). In this talk I will investigate how yiding and keneng react to evidentiality – the inherent encoding of information sources in a clause. In Chinese not all sentences can have the form of keneng-φ or yiding-φ. The compatibility actually depends on the evidential make-up of φ. Quite generally, clauses that relate to some kind of first-hand information are incompatible with yiding or keneng.
Speaker
Ms TANG Lili is a PhD candidate from the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics. Her research focuses on semantics and logic.
