| The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, I want to investigate the linguistic realization of situation types in Chinese. Second, I attempt to explore the correlation between situation types and relational time reference in Chinese.; The system of situation types used in this study consists of four major categories: state, achievement, accomplishment, and activity. To investigate their linguistic characteristics in Chinese, I concentrate on distinct distributional patterns of the aspectual markers zai, zhe, le, and guo, pre-verbal and post-verbal temporal adverbials, the negation words bu and mei (or meiyou), and the degree adverb hen 'very' in sentences representing the four different situation types. In traditional Chinese linguistics, it has been shown that the above linguistic elements, especially the aspectual markers zai, zhe, and le, often affect the syntactic and/or semantic well-formedness of sentences. My analyses show that the ways in which these elements may affect the acceptability of a sentence have much to do with the situation type of the sentence.; Previous research on situation types in linguistics only focused on their classification and the identification of their grammatical and semantic properties. What is original in this study is a discussion of linguistic implication of situation types---the correlation between situation types and relational time reference in Chinese. I argue and demonstrate that the temporality (i.e. past, present, or future) of Chinese sentences is often implicated by situation types. Specifically, if no time expression is used, then stative sentences characteristically implicate present time; achievement sentences typically implicate past time; accomplishment sentences implicate present time if zai is used to express the "process" meaning, or past time if le is used to highlight the "completion" meaning; activity sentences typically implicate present time in their unmarked forms (i.e. habitual activity sentences) or when the progressive aspect marker zai is used. Temporal implicatures of situation types are a very important facet of the Chinese temporal system. |
