| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 99 === Modality in the literature has been discussed from many different perspectives including the temporal interpretations. Some of the studies focus on the temporal reference in general in Mandarin Chinese, e.g. Lin (2006), Smith and Erbaugh (2005). However, little, if any, attention has been paid to explore the temporal interpretation of epistemic modal sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Accordingly, this thesis aims to give an account of temporal interpretation of modals with a special focus on two epistemic modals in Chinese: hui ‘will’, yao ‘must. In this study, we would like to discuss when and why epistemic modals hui and yao become compatible with past or completed/terminated situations. This study argues that epistemic modals can be rendered compatible with past situations, present situations, or completed/teminated situations: epistemic modals can be used to make ‘prediction’ about past situations if benlai ‘originally’ is inserted, and jiu can make epistemic modals compatible with perfective le and guo. We also argue that benlai provides a function that the time at which the prediction is made is shifted from the speech time to a past time. Besides, since jiu provides the ‘future relevance’, it enables hui/yao to denote a future perfect reading, so that they can be used to make ‘predictions’ about future perfect situations. Consequently, we find that hui/yao have a unified temporal semantics, i.e. they are used to predict that a situation will be realized in the future, either a relative future or an absolute future.
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