Toward a unified account of the scalar particle hai

This talk will present a number of puzzles about the meaning of the particle hai (还) in Mandarin and a preliminary semantic account that attempts to unify the data under discussion. While hai is known to have a wide range of uses such as additive, temporal, marginality, counter-to-expectation, and comparative/degree (Lu 1980, Ma 1984, Yeh 1998, Liu 2000, Shen 2001, Donazzan 2005, among many others), previous studies diverge in what the core semantics of hai should be, and it is not clear how these uses can be related to one another in a compositional manner. I will argue that hai is a scalar particle that introduces both modality and exhaustivity in the presuppositional component. In particular, the proposition hai(q) asserts that the prejacent proposition q is true and presupposes either that q could have been false, or that a contextually salient alternative proposition p which is not entailed by q could have been the only true proposition. It will be shown how the various uses of hai can be thus derived uniformly, and how the proposal provides a rationale for the fact that this particle appears in both the conjunctive morpheme haiyou and disjunctive morpheme haishi.