Reng and hai can back-shift the temporal perspective of keneng from the default, speaker's utterance time toward the past.
It is reng that back-shifts the temporal perspective of keneng from the default, speaker's utterance time to a past time.
With the rise of theories that sit between these polar views (see e.g. Giora 2003), the question of the compatibility of the salience in the lexicon and the default status of utterance interpretations requires more attention.
Furthermore, according to Xie (2012), when an abilitative de sentence contains a past-denoting temporal phrase, aspectual adverbs like reng and hai can shift the temporal perspective of de from the default, speaker's utterance time to (a sub-interval of) the topic time.
In conclusion, default processing of utterances that violate common ground seems to be quite egocentric at first, with anticipation relying primarily on episodic retrieval of visual and linguistic associations without any inference about the speaker's current mental states.
Automatic and unconscious enrichment produces a default interpretation of the utterance and "[o]nly when there is something wrong does the hearer suspend or inhibit the automatic transition which characterizes the normal cases of linguistic communication".
According to Xie's (2012) proposal, the fact that the abilitative modal de cannot occur with a past-denoting temporal phrase is due to the (idiosyncratic) requirement that the topic time of the abilitative use of de "should coincide with or follow the evaluation time [i.e., temporal perspective – author] of de, which is the utterance time by default" (p. 387).
From the previous subsection, we can conclude that the temporal perspective of unembedded keneng, whether in the epistemic or metaphysical reading, is by default anchored to the speaker's utterance time.
To begin with a common-sense definition, default interpretation of the speaker's utterance is normally understood to mean salient meaning intended by the speaker, or presumed by the addressee to have been intended, and recovered (a) without the help of inference from the speaker's intentions or (b) without conscious inferential process altogether.
Hence, the default prediction would be that performative utterances are apt for any form of assessment that applies to locutionary acts in general.
