Bouletic concord

Abstract

Mandarin bie is a preverbal negator that prototypically comes with prohibitive force, i.e., [ bie Q!] ≈ ‘don’t Q!’. This interpretive effect is subject to change (Yip 2016 , Liao and Wang 2022a ): for one thing, bie may receive an optative reading, in which case [x bie Q!] translates into ‘may x not Q!’ For another, it may take part in bouletic concord under desire predicates like xiwang ‘hope’: in a sentence of the form [x xiwang [ bie p]], bie merely seems to negate its prejacent p, and the sentence as a whole conveys x’s dispreference against p. Under this paper’s main proposal, inspired a.o. by Zeijlstra’s ( 2007 ) syntactic account of modal concord , bouletic concord constellations exemplify the Logical Forms of bie -clauses more generally: bie indeed just negates its prejacent, but has to be licensed by a higher bouletic operator des that it syntactically agrees with.