The semantics of Mandarin futurates

Abstract

This paper investigates future interpretations in Mandarin declarative root clauses without overt future modals, i.e., Mandarin futurates. Mandarin futurates require future time adverbs and schedulable eventualities, which denote future readings relative to the utterance time or a context-determined past time. Moreover, Mandarin futurates presuppose the existence of a plan in the context and are incompatible with a single perfective aspect marker le1 . To account for these facts, I argue that a covert future modal m-plan is present in futurates and extend the formal analysis for English simple futurates to Mandarin with necessary modifications.