The Eventuality Of Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation is dedicated to a research on the eventuality of Mandarin Chinese (MC). It is acknowledged that state, activity, achievement and accomplishment are the four basic aspectual types of verbs. In some languages like English, the four lexical aspects are denoted in the Lexicon, but in other languages, such as MC, this is not the case. As we know, the mono-morphemic verbs in MC are void of telicity. And due to this property, we claim that they can only denote the eventuality of state and activity in the Lexicon. Then, how MC denotes the eventuality of achievement and accomplishment kindles our interest.Our study begins from how state and activity are denoted in the Lexicon in the verbal system of MC. Meanwhile, we have explored the event structure of them. Then, we proceed to explore how achievement and accomplishment are denoted in MC. Through our study, we have found that MC has to take advantage of grammatical means to denote the two eventualities: to denote achievement, MC has to add aspect markers to shift the eventuality of state or activity into achievement. Aspect markers function as the eventuality predicate BECOME, which denotes the inchoative change of state; to denote accomplishment, MC has mainly two ways—one is to add aspect markers to activity verbs to denote a result, and the other is to make use of resultative verbal constructions (RVCs). RVCs are complex events which denote accomplishment, with one subevent denoting a cause event and the other subevent denoting a result event. The formation of RVCs can be accommodated in our accomplishment event structure. In addition to RVCs, we have found that DE constructions and English resultative constructions can also be accommodated in the accomplishment event structure. Our dissertation comes to a conclusion that in MC state and activity are denoted in the Lexicon and achievement and accomplishment are denoted in syntax.