Aspect in Mandarin Chinese
A corpus-based study
- Author(s): Richard Xiao 1 and Tony McEnery 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 University of Lancaster
- Format: PDF
- Publication Date November 2004
- e-Book ISBN: 9789027295019
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.73
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.
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