Interaction Of Aspect Markers And Verbs: An Empirical Study Of Chinese Existential-presentational Constructions

Chinese existential-presentational (EP) construction is a complex semantic network that is made up of a series of sub-constructions. The meaning of each sub-construction has a slight difference from each other and each tends to describe different event types. During the process of semantic divergence, aspect markers play an important role, and affect and constrain the verbs and the semantic meaning of each sub-construction. This thesis will focus on the aspect markers, and try to analyze the interaction between aspect markers and verbs and discover their influence on the semantic constraint and semantic opposition of each sub-construction. This thesis chooses three sub-constructions of Chinese existential-presentational construction as main research objects, namely Chinese existential-presentational sub-constructions marked by "zhe", "le" and "guo", and tries to discover the semantic characteristics and differences of each sub-construction on the basis of corpus research and data analysis. The research questions of this thesis are as follows:(1) Which kind of verbs does each sub-construction tend to attract and what event types does each sub-construction tend to attract and constrain; (2) What relevance do aspect markers "zhe", "le" and "guo" have with these semantic attraction and semantic constraint.According to the analysis of the data, existential-presentational sub-construction marked by "guo" represents that before the moment of speaking, some entity appears, exists or disappears in or from some place, but at the moment of speaking, that event does not exist any more or something happened and already ended. All event types of verbs can appear in this construction. Achievement verbs and accomplishment verbs match perfectly with aspect marker "guo" which is bounded and telic, and thus are most compatible with it. When state verbs and activity verbs which are unbounded and atelic appear in this construction, the construction adds boundedness and telicity to these two types of verbs.Existential-presentational sub-construction marked by aspect marker "le" emphasizes the final stage of the change of an event and the resultative state. Both achievement verbs and accomplishment verbs are telic and fit well with aspect marker "le". When achievement verbs appear in such construction, the construction adds the resultative stage to achievement verbs. When accomplishment verbs appear in such construction, aspect marker "le" coerces the internal processes of accomplishment verbs and puts more emphasis on the final stage and the resultative state of the event. Both the state verbs and activity verbs are unbounded and fit with the aspect marker "le". When activity verbs come into such construction, the construction puts emphasis on the final stage of an event and the resultative state, adding telicity and resultative stage to the activity verbs. When state verbs appear in such construction, they change from atelicity to telicity and describe the appearance and disappearance of the state and the resultative state after appearing and disappearing.Existential-presentational construction marked by "zhe" concentrates on the action that is happening or lasting at the moment of speaking and the resultative state at the moment of speaking after the action finishes. Activity verbs and state verbs are both atelic and unbounded and match perfectly with the atelic and unbounded aspect marker "zhe". When activity verbs and state verbs appear in existential-presentational construction, activity verbs highlight the middle stages of the action and state verbs emphasize the durativity and continuation of the state. Achievement verbs are both telic and bounded and thus contradict with aspect marker "zhe". When accomplishment verbs appear in such construction, they can either emphasize the middle stage of the event and coerce the telicity of the verbs, or they can emphasize the remaining resultative state after the endpoint of the event and coerce the middle stage of event. Achievement verbs are both telic and bounded which contradict with aspect marker "zhe". The events of them also do not have stages and they are not durative. As a consequence, generally, achievement verbs do not appear in existential construction marked by "zhe".