The semantics and pragmatics of chadian mei in Mandarin Chinese

The current paper deals with the Mandarin Chinese construction chadian mei ‘almost NEG’ that is ambiguous depending on whether negation has a normal or pleonastic interpretation. The literature either takes mei as semantically vacuous in the latter interpretation (e.g. Zhu 1959; Liu 2011; Yuan 2013), or attributes the ambiguity to that of the approximation marker Chadian (Kaufmann & Xu 2013). This paper offers novel empirical arguments for the ambiguity of mei, and proposes a multidimensional semantic analysis for the ‘pleonastic’ mei: the apparent semantically vacuous mei is a counterfactual commentary expression with non-at-issue meaning contributions at the levels of conventional implicatures and conventional presuppositions. I argue that this analysis fits with the distributional properties of chadian mei and that additionally, it provides further empirical support for the three-dimensional semantic framework (Liu 2012).