Studies Of The Mandarin Chinese Aspect System

Based on the assumption that Mandarin Chinese is an aspect-prominent language and its aspect system is sensitive to the verb types, we propose a hypothesis that the Mandarin Chinese aspect system consists of three components— —the verb lexical aspect, the predicational aspect, and the grammatical aspect. Together with tense, these three kinds of aspectual information are organized in a tense-aspect hierarchy, with the verb lexical aspect at the lowest level, the tense at the highest level, and the predicational and grammatical aspects in between.The verb lexical aspect occurs at the lowest level, because it can largely determine the predicational aspect, which under a certain condition can in turn determine the grammatical aspect.The predicational aspect takes place at the level of VP (in the sense of the VP in the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis), and it crucially concerns the information about the relationship between the verb and its arguments.The grammatical aspect manifests itself by the presence of an aspectual marker like le,zhe, or (zheng)zai. The tense operator occurs at the highest level, indicating the temporal location of the event.The tense-aspect hierarchy is formulated as a calculus. The aspectual property of the lexical verb serves as the argument for the function, the predicational aspect, yielding "predicational aspect (verb lexical aspect)" as its value, which in turn serves as the argument for the function, the grammatical aspect. Of course, the association of different levies of aspect is conditioned. Indeed they have to obey the Selection Restriction and the Default Association.The dissertation also addresses the issue of telicity. After reviewing and evaluating different proposals, it formulates the criterion of "Identifiable Degree of Change" to distinguish between telic and atelic predications.The dissertation is organized as follows:Chapter one introduces the concept of aspect and the makes a distinction between tense, aspect and Aktionsart. It also introduces some of the most influential aspect systems.Chapter two gives a brief review of the previous work done by Chinese scholars, and an analysis of the characteristics of Mandarin Chinese. On the basis of this, it makes an attempt to build up an aspect system that is composed of three parts: the verb lexical aspect, the predicational aspect and the grammatical aspect.Chapter three conerns itself with the classification of verbs. This dissertation takes the classes of states, activities, achievements to be basic, and the class of accomplishments to be composite. It also gives a detailed account of each class .Chapter four develops a way to determine the telicity of predications and verbs. We propose that Identifiable Degree of Change should be the desired criterion for this end.Chapter five discusses the predicational aspect and its relation with the other...