The Factuality Status of Chinese Necessity Modals Exploring the Distribution Via Corpus-Based Approach

This paper is intended to test the deontic vs anankastic hypothesis outlined by Sparvoli (2012). The stipulation is that, in past contexts, the deontic modals trigger a counterfactual inference while the anankastic (here called, goal-oriented modals) either triggers an actuality entailment effects (“only possibility” modals) or a generic non-factual reading (“mere necessity” modals). The result of this corpus-based study conducted in a Chinese-English parallel corpus confirm the crucial role played by the deontic vs goal-oriented contrast in the marking of factuality in Chinese and shows that the factuality value decreases across a cline from goal-oriented to deontic modals.

On the actuality entailment of Spanish root modals

This paper examines the actuality entailments of Spanish past perfective root modals. I wil sidewith those authors that maintain that the phenomenon is syntactic. Nevertheless, the emphasis will not beon scope differences between projections, but on the fact that the root modal periphrasis is an example ofrestructuring structure. More precisely, I will claim that root modal periphrases may be included amongthe constructions with a low level of restructuring. This point of view will take me to propose that theseperiphrastic structures give rise to a complex event which behaves as a non-homogeneous predicate withregard to temporal-aspectual meaning.