On Telicity Of Deadjectival Verbs In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis mainly adopts the theory of grammatical aspect to discuss deadjectival verbs in Mandarin Chinese,that is,the telicity of“Adjective+?”(e.g.“??”,“??”).Telicity refers to the property of events denoted by a verb or verb phrase with internal telos.A verb or verb phrase with internal telos is called telic verbs,such as,run a mile,walk to the park;a verb or verb phrase without internal telos is called atelic verbs,such as,run,walk,etc.From Vendler(1967) on, researches in telicity centered on how to distinguish telic verbs from atelic verbs and how to define telicity property. But with the indepth researches ono telicity(e.g. Hay, Kennedy, and Levin, 1999; Slabakova, 2001; Kate Kearns, 2007, 2011; Jens Fleischhauer, 2013), people find that telicity is not that clearcut as has been assumed. For example, “cool” in “The soup cooled in an hour/for an hour” takes both telic and atelic properties, and thus poses challenges to researches of telicity, leading to a new round of research passion.Research on “?” at home has been conducted a lot(e.g. Shang Xin, 2001; Lin Ruowang. 2002; Jin Lixin, 2003; Luo Juan, 2013; Ma Kedong, 2013, etc), but there are few researches about the telicity of “Adjective +?”. Therefore, this thesis will discuss this phenomenon from the following aspects:(1) On grounds of open-scale and closed-scale adjectives, telicity property of deadjectival verbs is described.(2) trace researches on grammatical aspectual marker “?”, telicity property of “Adjective+?” is discussed.(3) By comparing with telicity of English deadjectival verbs, the telicity of “Adjective+?” in Mandarin Chinese is verified.(4) Taking in and for adverbials to examine semantic properties of Chinese structure “Adjective+?”.Through discussions, we come to the following conclusions:(1) “Adjective+?” has verbal features, and has the same telicity property like English deadjectival verbs.(2) “Adjective+?” in Mandarin Chinese has event delay interpretation.(3) Formal semantic analysis proposed by Kearns(2007) on English deadjectival verbs can well be applied to explain the semantic features of “Adjective+?”.