https://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/main/zh-tw?/sign/0205 Context restrictors, exhaustivity, and minimal sufficiency: the semantics of Mandarin jiu 日期：2026-02-05（四）14:00~16:00 主講人：廖秀真 副教授 (國立陽明交通大學） 會議地點：中央研究院人文社會科學館(南棟5樓519會議室) 摘要 Mandarin jiu, which also functions as a conditional marker, exemplifies a broader cross-linguistic pattern whereby a single item gives rise to both minimal-sufficiency and exclusive readings in conditionals and simplex sentences. Among existing accounts of this duality, I argue that Mandarin jiu provides compelling evidence for a modal-base analysis of minimal sufficiency, thereby supporting the conditional-based analysis of English just proposed by Coppock & Lindahl (2014). On this view, jiu introduces a necessity claim evaluated relative to a contextually supplied modal base, and the observed position-meaning correlations are derived through local exhaustification carried out by a covert exhaustivity operator O, triggered by a focus feature on jiu’s associate. Building on Kratzer’s (1986) if-restrictor analysis and Haiman’s (1978) insights into the frame-setting functions of conditional clauses and topics, leftward associates—both clausal and non-clausal—are analyzed as context restrictors that update the modal base, yielding a non- exclusive minimal-sufficiency interpretation. This interpretation may surface as a sufficiency conditional, a relatively small-quantity reading, or a relative earliness reading. In contrast, rightward association triggers exhaustification over the jiu-clause itself, resulting in an exclusive interpretation. I further argue that certain scalar pragmatic effects, most notably emphatic readings with extreme predicates and “lowness”-type implications under non-scalar focus, motivate the incorporation of second- order (recursive) exhaustification into the analysis. Overall, this proposal offers a unified semantics for jiu and contributes to a broader cross- linguistic understanding of how modal bases may be manipulated to derive multiple minimal sufficiency readings from exclusive operators. --

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