| Chinese future auxiliaries have been a controversial topic in the study of Chinese grammar in many aspects and recently there is a shift of focus in study from grammar to their meaning interpretation. Because of the development history of Chinese grammar, the meaning study of Chinese future auxiliaries adheres to the traditional semantic view that the sentence meanings can be ascribed to the truth conditions of the sentences themselves, without considering pragmatic factors. With the rapid development of pragmatic theories today, integrating the pragmatic mechanism with the traditional meaning interpretation may be an effective way.The present dissertation aims at explaining the semantics-pragmatics interface meanings of the future auxiliaries in modern Chinese within the newborn Default Semantic Model. The basis and prerequisite for achieving the research objective is to obtain a comprehensive knowledge of the category, including technical term, word class, characteristics, development track, and previous studies on meaning, according to which the research objects----JIANG, YAO, and HUI can be defined up and the exsiting problems of meaning interpretation, viz., one-sided meaning interpretation, lack of a theoretical model, and lack of a comprehensive meaning analysis of the category, become highlighted.The dissertation chooses the Default Semantic Model proposed by Jaszczolt as an analytic framework owing to its applicability to future auxiliaries in modern Chinese and its reasonable and effective solutions to the above three problems.In Default Semantics, default meaning is a non-truth-conditional meaning triggered by conventions of language use and a non-inferential meaning arising without the help of contexts (Jaszczolt 1999, 2005, 2006a: 5, 2006b, 2007: 3, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d, 2009e, 2009f, 2009g), whereas inferential meaning, as the antithesis of default meaning, underlines the evidence of the speaker's intention to convey a certain meaning, which can be inferred by the audience on the basis of the evidence provided. As Jaszczolt notes, one meaning is achieved through the interaction of four sources: word meaning and sentence structure, conscious pragmatic inference, cognitive defaults, and social-cultural defaults. Semantics and pragmatics merge organically with each other to express meanings. Merger representations, rather than one-sided meaning interpretations, contain both semantic and pragmatic elements and are composed of conscious inferences and unconscious defaults. By introducing"Acceptability Operator"proposed by Grice (2001) and Discourse Representation Structure (Kamp and Reyle 1993) to her theory, Jaszczolt constructs the Default Semantic Model. The function ACCΔne/s means it is acceptable, to the degree n, that it is the case that [e or s]. Jaszczolt applies the model to the meaning analysis of English future auxiliaries from two perspectives: to provide a unitary account of uses of English will in terms of merger representations and to propose a unitary account for some core expressions or auxiliaries used to express future time reference in English, which allows the analogy to Chinese future auxiliaries.Interpreting the meanings of a category as an integral whole contains two main aspects: meanings of individual members and meaning relations between members and the Chinese future auxiliary category is no exception. The dissertation first focuses on the meanings of individual Chinese future auxiliaries. According to Default Semantics, the meanings of each Chinese future auxiliary consist of both semantic and pragmatic components. Semantically, a default future meaning is always involved, and pragmatically, inferential modal meanings, including dynamic modal meanings, deontic modal meanings, and epistemic modal meanings, express attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the factual content of the utterance, e.g. uncertainty, definiteness, vagueness, and possibility. On the basis of a generalized merger representation, the default future meaning blends respectively with modal meanings of varying degrees to derive unambiguous meanings. JIANG, YAO, and HUI are interpreted in terms of an internal consistency of argumentation logic and default semantic analysis.The dissertation further explores meaning relations in full length, including modal meaning relations and future meaning relations, between JIANG, YAO, and HUI equally within the Default Semantic Model and makes an empirical study of co-occurrence phenomena and mutual restrictions by analyzing all the twelve possible co-occurrence forms. The dissertation summarizes five features of co-occurrence and a general rule, viz., future meaning > epistemic possibility > epistemic necessity > deontic > dynamic, which is basically in accordance with and superior to the traditional point of view, namely, epistemic > deontic > dynamic. It is worth while to note that there is an agreement between the co-occurrence rule and the rationale for the Default Semantic Model that the modality degree of Chinese future auxiliaries is in inverse proportion to the gradation of the speaker's intentions and by contrast, agrees with the sequence of their co-occurrence.By applying the Default Semantic Model, the research provides a unitary account for not only individual Chinese future auxiliaries but also meaning relations within the category, fills in the gaps in the field of the holistic meaning interpretation of the Chinese future auxiliary category, and finally comes to the conclusion that there is no such meaning with a clear-cut demarcation between semantic and pragmatic meanings or between future and modal meanings, but a merger representation without any ambiguity. In addition, the research result assesses, from one aspect, the validity and explanatory power of the Default Semantic Model and, from the perspective of research sustainability, has a bearing on other Chinese tense categories, even other grammatical categories, such as indexicals and predicates. |
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