Polarity and the diachronic development of deontic modality in Chinese

In this paper, first instantiations of deontic modality in Archaic Chinese (Early Archaic Chinese EAC, 10
^th
- 6
^th
c. BCE, and Late Archaic Chinese LAC, 5
^th
- 2
^nd
c. BCE) are at issue. Deontic expressions predominantly include synthetic modal negative markers and verbs of possibility in combination with negation and in rhetorical questions; i.e. they are closely related to polarity. In this brief study, a syntactic analysis of deontic modal readings mainly in LAC will be proposed. The discussion is inspired by Cormack and Smith (2002), who propose a polarity head, which distinguishes a Modal
₁
connected to necessity readings and a Modal
₂
connected to possibility readings.