Semantic Features Of Predicate Adjectives With Aspect Markers In Mandarin Chinese

Adjectives in Mandarin Chinese have been studied by a lot of scholars and many interesting facts have been revealed. The distinction of property adjectives and descriptive adjectives has drawn much attention among Chinese linguists, and lots of analyses have been proposed to account for their syntactic distribution, mostly, as attributives or as predicates. It is somehow dissatisfactory that, although quite a lot of scholars have noticed the structure and made their attempts to analyze and interpret it, they failed to reach a consensus even on the word class that “X” in the construction “X + aspect markers” as a predicate belongs to. In the thesis, we will firstly present the debate on the A-V division in the construction “X + aspect markers”, and give a brief review of the previous research achievements on the construction from different perspectives as well as a comment on these researches.Afterwards, as aspect has received a great deal of interest in Chinese linguistics in the last thirty years, the thesis will make a review about the researches on Chinese aspects. In Chinese, there is no inflectional morphology to express tense, number, gender, or case. Chinese aspect markers do not relate the situation described by the sentence to the time of utterance but express various perspectives on the situation; hence, they express various aspect rather than tense relations.The previous statistics have shown that only small portion of Chinese property adjectives may occur immediately with the aspect markers. This thesis, on the basis of analyzing the compatibility of different adjectives with aspect markers, holds that in Mandarin Chinese, some adjectives in co-occurrence with the aspect markers, to a certain extent, have some properties of verbs, and attempts to excavate the semantic features of the predicate adjectives from several dimensions. This paper aims to provide a brief sketch on how some of the schematic domains play roles on Chinese adjectives, such as gradability, boundedness, and(non)-resettability. Thus, this paper, in other words, puts an inquiry into the significance of boundedness, scalarity, and also the resettability on Chinese adjectives by studying the conceptualization schemas and their interesting interactions with syntax.