ABSTRACT
This chapter has four parts. Section 5.1 describes a problem that arises in many sentences with parametric cái, jiù and zài: At a first glance, facts of syntactic and of semantic scope systematically fail to coincide, and three different solutions to the problem will be shown not to solve the problem in a satisfying way. Only a more radical proposal involving tripartite modal structures, combined with the assumption of matrix clause restrictors, will be able to settle the problem. Section 5.2 picks out a well-defined class of sentences with parametric cái and jiù in which the predicates following the particles have acquired a conventionalized modal function. In section 5.3 I will review a three-way ambiguous English sentence and its univocal translations into Mandarin. All of them are relevant to the discussion of parametric words and the problems of scope interaction, with the latter being the recurrent topic of this chapter. The final section 5.4 characterizes the conditions in which more than a single parametric word may be used per clause, examples are given of each possible combination, and some tasks for further research are delimited.
