Jing Sun
South China Normal University
Chinese modal particles like ba and ne have long puzzled semanticists. They clearly do something—””Tā huì lái”” (He will come) feels different from “”Tā huì lái ba”” (He will come, I suppose?)—but what exactly they contribute resists truth-conditional treatment. Recent work (Fang 2016; Wang 2022) connects them to illocutionary force, showing they mark speech act types. What remains unclear is how they combine with propositional content to yield specific forces. This paper answers that question within Type-Logical Grammar (TLG), a framework built on λ-calculus that takes compositionality seriously.
The basic idea: treat modal particles as functions that take propositional content and return speech acts. Take ba in its directive use, as in “”Chī ba!”” (Eat!). The verb provides a property of type ⟨e,t⟩. I take ba to be of type ⟨⟨e,t⟩, ⟨c, act⟩⟩, where c is context and act is speech act type. Its λ-term is λP⟨e,t⟩. λc. DIRECTIVE(P(hearer(c)))(c). It takes a property, applies it to the hearer, and returns a directive speech act. Composition is just function application.
This extends to other uses. In “”Tā huì lái ba?”” (tentative question), ba combines with a proposition (type t), with λ-term λp. λc. TENTATIVE-QUESTION(p)(c). Particles like ne and a receive parallel treatments. The system handles interactions with sentence types without extra stipulations.
If the analysis works, it shows two things. First, illocutionary force can be integrated into a compositional semantics. Second, Chinese modal particles are systematic force markers with computable meanings. TLG, with its λ-calculus backbone, gives us a precise language to say what they mean and how they combine.
Chair: tba
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Location:
SOPhiA 2026 