Temporal Hái in Mandarin Chinese Revisited: A Presuppositional Account

This paper re-examines temporal hái thoroughly. Two issues concerning hái cannot be taken care of by previous studies. The firs one is why hái always scopes over negation, syntactically and semantically. The second is related to the first one: why the continuation reading expressed by hái cannot be canceled. Temporal hái is argued, in this paper, to denote continuation of a situation and to presuppose modal necessity of a negated proposition, either weak epistemic necessity or deontic necessity. The two issues raised are explained in the following way: the reading which negation + hái could theoretically express is redundant with the presupposition, and redundancy is dispreferred. This paper also discusses other minor issues including how the underspecification between weak epistemic necessity and deontic necessity can be resolved and why it is weak epistemic necessity, instead of regular or even intensified epistemic necessity.