[演講] Context restrictors, exhaustivity, and minimal sufficien
https://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/main/zh-tw?/sign/0205
Context restrictors, exhaustivity, and minimal sufficiency: the semantics of
Mandarin jiu
日期：2026-02-05（四）14:00~16:00
主講人：廖秀真 副教授 (國立陽明交通大學）
會議地點：中央研究院人文社會科學館(南棟5樓519會議室)
摘要
Mandarin jiu, which also functions as a conditional marker, exemplifies a
broader cross-linguistic pattern whereby a single item gives rise to both
minimal-sufficiency and exclusive readings in conditionals and simplex
sentences. Among existing accounts of this duality, I argue that Mandarin jiu
provides compelling evidence for a modal-base analysis of minimal sufficiency,
thereby supporting the conditional-based analysis of English just proposed by
Coppock & Lindahl (2014). On this view, jiu introduces a necessity claim
evaluated relative to a contextually supplied modal base, and the observed
position-meaning correlations are derived through local exhaustification
carried out by a covert exhaustivity operator O, triggered by a focus feature
on jiu’s associate. Building on Kratzer’s (1986) if-restrictor analysis and
Haiman’s (1978) insights into the frame-setting functions of conditional
clauses and topics, leftward associates—both clausal and non-clausal—are
analyzed as context restrictors that update the modal base, yielding a non-
exclusive minimal-sufficiency interpretation. This interpretation may surface
as a sufficiency conditional, a relatively small-quantity reading, or a
relative earliness reading. In contrast, rightward association triggers
exhaustification over the jiu-clause itself, resulting in an exclusive
interpretation. I further argue that certain scalar pragmatic effects, most
notably emphatic readings with extreme predicates and “lowness”-type
implications under non-scalar focus, motivate the incorporation of second-
order (recursive) exhaustification into the analysis. Overall, this proposal
offers a unified semantics for jiu and contributes to a broader cross-
linguistic understanding of how modal bases may be manipulated to derive
multiple minimal sufficiency readings from exclusive operators.
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