A Study Of Chinese Perfective Marker "Le"Following Inner Aspect Approach

The modern Chinese has a full-fledged system of aspectual markers, in which the perfective aspect is manifested by le. However, a brief review of the previous studies on le from the generative approach will produce the idea that they are all theoretically or semantically flawed. Therefore, this thesis attempts to assume the task to provide a more convincing analysis on this perfective marker with the renewed phrase structure. It means to shift the work of aspect representation from lexical entry to syntactic structure, so that its semantic requirement is exhibited by structural constraints. The approach proposed is driven by semantic analysis of different aspect expressions, and the phrase structure will follow the one raised in the articulated VP with inner aspect proposed in Travis (2010). The aspectual information under this framework is carried by a bipartite system consisting of the aspectual marker itself at the head of inner AspP and a corresponding event light verb e/v which heads the shell of the predicate part. The light verb is endowed with two basic grammatical functions:first, it serves as a semantic filter, excluding the predicates that are not compatible with the interpretation under perfective aspect; second, it carries an uninterpretable feature, which attracts the raising of the lexical verb and turns the activity into an accomplishment. The semantics of the predicate is interpreted in a scope that we tentatively term as "event domain", which begins with the light verb and ends with the aspectual marker at the head of inner AspP. This mechanism of light verb merging and feature checking then provides a syntactic-semantic interface, which is essential for associating the real interpretation with structural relations. The hypothesis provides a unified analysis to verb-final and sentence-final le as aspectual markers, and makes accurate prediction on the co-occurrence condition of le and negative words bu and mei. Finally, such an approach also applies to the analysis of experiential aspectual marker guo, which poses as a proof to its rationality.