体标记下的汉语谓语形容词语义特征研究

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Motivation of the Study
In writing the grammar of any language, a linguist will classify the lexicon of thelanguage into a number of word classes or “parts-of-speech”. While word classdistinctions are found in every language, it is a well-known fact that there is aconsiderable variations across languages with regard to the number of distinctions madeand the places in the lexicon where the dividing line between word classes are drawn(Schachter, 1985). Within this range of variation, however, there is at least onepart-of-speech distinction that is attested in all languages, namely the distinctionbetween the major word classes, i.e., nouns and verbs. As opposed to the nouns andverbs, adjectives do not constitute a universal linguistic category. While inIndo-European languages, for instance, a distinction can be made between nouns, verbsand a third open class of adjectives, this is by no means the case for all languages.Unlike most of the Indo-European languages, of which word classes in most cases canbe easily distinguished from each other even at the first glimpse of their spelling forms(that is, from their derivative suffixes or inflectional morphology), Mandarin Chinese,as a typical isolated language, has no pure suffixes to form a certain kind of words ormorphological changes to represent the grammatical categories like number, case, tense,or aspect, etc. This, to some extent, brings about a great difficulty in dividing wordclasses of Chinese lexical items and it has remained to be a tough issue for a long time.
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1.2 Objectives of The Study
More often we can distinguish verbs from adjectives by some criteria, but in somecases, for instance, when we move our eyes to ‘aspect’ - what is generally thought to bethe main feature of verbs, we confront with the fact that there remains a discrepancy inidentifying the word class of “X” in the construction “X + aspect markers (i.e.,zhe/le/guo, etc.)” in Mandarin Chinese - here, to be easily distinguished from theadjectives used in other context, we temporarily use “X” to stand for the adjectives usedin occurrence with the aspect markers. Although quite a lot of scholars have made theirefforts to analyze and interpret it, yet they failed to reach a consensus even on thecategory that “X” in the construction belongs to.Thus, our great interest is evoked by the distribution and interpretation of differentsorts of adjectives in the construction. In the thesis, we will firstly present the debate onthe A-V division in the construction “X + aspect markers”, and give a brief review ofthe previous research achievements on the construction from different perspectives aswell as a comment on them. Afterwards, as it is a fact that the use of aspect makerssomehow influences the interpretation of these adjectives in the construction, the thesis,on the basis of analyzing the compatibility of different kind of adjectives with aspectmarkers, holds that in Mandarin Chinese, some adjectives (it can be easily found outthat most of them are those so-called monosyllabic dynamic adjectives.) inco-occurrence with the aspect markers, to a certain extent, have some properties ofverbs as they are used as predicates, and we will attempt to sort out their subtle semanticfeatures from several dimensions.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Introduction
As mentioned above, adjectives in Mandarin Chinese have been studied by a lot ofscholars and many interesting facts have been revealed. When we focus on theconstruction “X + aspect markers (i.e., zhe/le/guo, etc.)”, there is a problem. A numberof scholars have also noticed the construction “X + aspect markers” and have madetheir efforts to analyze and interpret it, yet there is still a debate even on the categorythat “X” in the construction belongs to.In the following part we will at first provide a brief a brief review of some of theprevious researches on the construction. For the lacking of finite verbs and inflectionalmorphology, Chinese aspects are often marked by some optional particles. Theseparticles are called aspect markers, which are used to represent different state of eventin the time of a situation described by the sentence. Most analyses of Chinese aspectfocus on the four aspect markers: le, guo, zhe, and zai. The following part will firstlypresent these aspect markers.
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2.2 The Four Aspect Markers in Chinese
In the following section, we will account for the use of the four aspect markers.But we should keep in mind that there are great differences between Chinese andEnglish. This difference between Chinese and English is based on the analysis thatChinese is “result-oriented” whereas English is more “action-oriented” (Li, 1990). Weshall see how these aspect markers in Chinese signal the aspectual system of thelanguage and how they influence the semantic interpretation of predicate as follows. In general, the markers le is thought to be a perfective marker, which expresses an event in a whole duration, as a situation, with no reference to its internal structure,bounded at the beginning and the end. Therefore, le has often been described as a signalto mark completion (Chao, 1968). However, there are some other scholars who attachan importance on the perfectivity of le and they argue that le does not represent acompleted event or action by itself (Li & Thompson, 1981). They hold that theinterpretation of completion often comes from the meaning of the verb followed by le.For instance, le indicates that the event comes to its natural finishing point, that is, it iscompleted when the verb describes a situation with a clear boundary in time. However,when the verb expresses a situation without a natural temporal boundary, le used in sucha situation is not to signal the completion but the termination of a situation.
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Chapter Three Theoretic Framework..........25
3.1 Introduction.........25
3.2 Tense and Aspect.........26
3.3 Vendler’s Four Aspectual Classes.........28
3.4 Chinese Aspect System.........30
3.5 Aspectual Coercion.........32
3.6 Summary.........37
Chapter Four Analysis on Semantic Features.........38
4.1 Introduction.........38
4.2 The Change of State.........39
4.3 The Semantic Features.........40
4.6 Summary.........42

Chapter Four Analysis on Semantic Features

4.1 Introduction
A long tradition of research supports the idea that the direction of derivation in thecausative/inchoative alternation is conditioned by whether the event denoted by a verbhas a cause external to the single argument of the intransitive or one brought about bythe single argument of the intransitive (Smith 1970; Croft 1990).

4.2 The Change of State
Two different types of states underlie change of state verbs (COS) like redden andbreak. Adjectival states like red (also called property concepts, Dixon 1982) entail noprior change, and hence it can be denied that there was an event leading up to the state,as in “The dirt is red, but nobody reddened it”. With result states like broken, however,such denial leads to contradiction, as in “#The broken light-pole never did break”.Similarly, while result states can be modified by adverbials, owing to the fact that anevent underlies the state, as in the naturally occurring the quickly broken compromise,adjectival states cannot be so modified, as evidenced by the oddness of “the quicklyred house”.

Conclusion

Adjectives in Mandarin Chinese have become a hot academic target among theresearchers. In most cases, we can distinguish verbs from adjectives by some criteria.But there are still cases in which the use of adjectives and verbs are mixed.After presenting the discrepancy between scholars towards the question about whatkind of word class the “X” should be classified when it is used together with aspectmarkers, the thesis provide a brief review for the previous researches from severalperspectives. This thesis has examined the semantic features of Chinese adjectives inthe construction “X + aspect markers”, by focusing the interaction between variousadjectives and aspect markers under the assumption of aspectual coercion. The mainconclusions have been drawn from the effects that the aspectual operators bring about tothe subtle meaning shift that the adjectives undergo.In this paper, I explore the derivational relationship between adjectives and verbsin Mandarin Chinese, a question complicated by a controversy over whether anindependent class of adjectives needs to be posited in the language. I argue that only onekind of regular derivational relation between these predicates is attestedin Mandarin:COS verbs may be systematically derived from adjectives, but there is nocorrespondingly systematic derivation of result state adjectives from COS verbs. Thekey contrast is in the regularity of the derivation: I argue that Mandarin has bothdeadjectival COS verbs and deverbal result state adjectives, but only the former aresystematically available, while the availability of the latter is determined byconceptual-pragmatic rather than grammatical factors.
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