On Telicity Of Eventualities In Mandarin Chinese

Telicity is an important feature in the study of situation aspect or lexical aspect,which means that an action has an intrinsic nature endpoint.It can be either encoded by the lexical semantics of the verb or determined by other elements in the sentences.That is,telicity is not only the temporal semantic feature of the verb itself,but also the verb phrase or the sentence.This dissertation aims to make a systematic analysis of the relationship between the elements of the verb phrase and the telicity of the event under the framework of event semantics.This thesis focuses on four controversial issues:(1)The telicity of adjective predicate sentence;(2)The differences of the telicity and process of the event expressed by different VV/VA Compounds;(3)The relationship between nominative object and telicity.Two special phenomena in Chinese are discussed in detail: the perfective paradox and telic events with bare noun object;(4)The nature and function of the aspect marker le.The first two issues are about the relationship between two kinds of special predicates and telicity,and the latter two about the relationship between the nominative object,aspect marker le and the telicity.The third to sixth chapters of this thesis discussed the above issues respectively.Chapter 3 discusses the telicity of adjective predicate events,and reveals the realationship between scalar structure and telicity.The telicity of the dynamic change events expressed by adjectives is determined by the scalar structure of adjectives.To be specific,only the events expressed by adjectives with bounded scalar structure have telicity.The maximum value or the minimum value in the scalar structure of bounded scalar adjectives provides an endpoint for the event.Although the events expressed by both bounded and unbounded adjectives involve changes,they are different.The“bounded adjective + le ” construction usually expresses the change of state of the object,while “unbounded adjective + le” only expresses the degree change of the object in a certain dimension.Chapter 4 examines the telicity and process of events expressed by the resultative verb compounds,and explains the differences between the telicity and process from the event structure.Specifically,the two sub-events in the event expressed by the verbal form have two kinds of relations: a one-to-one mapping relationship and a mapping to the last part.The event telicity expressed by the resultative verb compounds is determined by the subevent represented by the resultative components.If the subevent is a state change event or a culmination event,the whole event has telicity.Whether the event expressed by resultative verb compounds is procedural or not depends on the internal two subevents.Only when two subevents are both procedural and incremental can the whole event have an internal process.Besides,the telicity of VA resultative is directly related to whether the VA resultative has result-deviation meaning.Chapter 5 is an in-depth study on the relationship between nominal objects and event telicity.It is concluded that the telicity of event mainly depended on the reading of nominal objects.The fundamental reason why Chinese and English differ in the phenomenon of perfective paradox lies in the different reading of nominal phrase.Bare nouns in Chinese can be interpreted both partially and holistically,while they can only be interpreted holistically in English.The events with bare noun objects in Chinese have telicity when the bare noun objects are specific or definite in certain context.When appearing in the position after ba,the telicity of the event sentence is resulted from the holistic interpretation of the nouns following ba.Chapter 6 analyzes the relationship between the event and aspect marker le.The aspect marker le will not affect the telicity of the event.le is neither a completion marker nor an realization marker or a termination marker,but a typical perfective aspect marker.Its function is to mark a closed event which has both an initial point and an endpoint.The so-called grammatical meanings of "completion" or "termination" are essentially incidental meanings produced by different types of events marked by le.Except for the main body discussed above,Chapter 1 is an introduction,Chapter 2is a literature review of event telicity,and Chapter 7 is a brief conclusion,summarizing the major findings and innovation attempts of present study,and laying down issues unresolved.