A Cartographic Study of Hlai Modals

This paper focuses on the modal system in Hlai and its interaction with negation. Hlai is spoken on Hainan Island and it belongs to the Kra-Dai language group. While previous studies investigating Hlai are scarce, we contribute to the extension of linguistic theories applied to a language rarely known by researchers. This paper provides four types of modals in Hlai: epistemic, deontic, circumstantial and bouletic modals. The negative construals are also investigated in terms of their scopal interaction with various types of modality, as well as their distinct morphological shapes. Based on de Haan's (2004) typological hypothesis, Hlai is a 'modal suppletion' language. In addition, the scope of negation is higher than the modal scope. Through examining the co-occurrence restrictions among different types of modals, their hierarchical arrangement can be presented as follows: epistemic ＞ subject ＞ deontic ＞ dynamic. Our findings by and large conform to Tsai's (2015) analysis of Chinese modals with respect to their structural distribution and semantic interpretation.