The Compositionality of Mandarin Aspect: A Parallel Corpus Study

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese does not grammaticalize tense, but makes abundant use of aspectual distinctions in the lexicon and grammar. The way it shapes reference to time and events is consequently very different from that in European languages. This dissertation studies the compositional interpretation of Mandarin aspect, grounded in empirical data from a parallel corpus. The corpus consists of French source texts and translations to a number of European languages and to Mandarin, allowing the author to use European tense-aspect distinctions as a probe into the Mandarin aspectual system. The corpus data provide empirical support for claims made in the literature about zhe (imperfective marker), zai (progressive marker), and guo (experiential perfect marker). They also provide support for the hypothesis that aspectually unmarked sentences have a stative interpretation by default, while eventive interpretations must use overt aspectual expressions. In the last part of the dissertation, the author builds a semantic analysis of so-called resultative verb compounds and their competitor, known as post-verbal le. Resultative verb compounds combine the verb with a resultative complement to produce a telic event plus a result state at the interface between lexicon and syntax. Post-verbal le is an aspectual marker that leads to a perfective or resultative perfect interpretation depending on the kind of eventuality description it combines with. The dissertation finds that Mandarin establishes more complex aspectual distinctions than the perfective/imperfective or progressive/non-progressive dichotomies in European languages, and that parallel corpus data can be fruitfully used to bring out the relevant differences.