A temporal analysis for ‘irrealis’ zai

The Mandarin Chinese adverb ZAI, in its adverbial use, displays a number of peculiarities—concerning the temporal ori-entation of the predicate, its aspectual prop-erties and the syntactic/logical role of the sentence where it occurs—which, as a whole, have been subsumed under the fea-ture ‘irrealis’. In this paper, we consider ZAI as an additive particle in the domain of events and we propose to derive its ‘irrealis’ flavour from constraints on the structure and temporal location of the asserted event. As an additive particle, ZAI conveys a presup-position which cannot be recovered indipen-dently from the context of occurrence