| This dissertation is an inquiry into the aspect marker le's meanings in Mandarin Chinese and its relationship with situation types. It is widely accepted that there are two configurationally-determined meanings of le: verbal suffix le encodes perfectivity, while sentence-final particle le indicates 'change of state' (Chao, 1968; Lu, 1996; Ross 1995, and Li and Thompson 1981). This study argues for an alternative account of le's meanings, the situation approach, according to which le's meanings are determined not by its surface position, but by the interaction between situation type and le's use as an aspect marker. According to this account, when le is associated with dynamic situations (activity, accomplishment, and achievement), it encodes perfectivity by default; when le is associated with stative situations (stative verbs, adjective, nouns, auxiliaries and negatives, etc.), it encodes inchoativity by default. However, le's meaning can be ambiguous without context, for instance in sentence-final position. This is because situation types can be changed through coercion, an implicit situation shift that is contextually governed by a semantic reinterpretation process (De Swart, 1998 and 2000). Context coercion is proposed here to account for situational shift and le's semantic change.;Three experiments were conducted to obtain empirical evidence for the situation approach: an off-line sentence interpretation test, an off-line sentence naturalness judgment test, and an on-line experiment which used the moving window paradigm to investigate the processing of le in situation-concordant sentences (aspectually transparent, with no situation shift) and situation-coerced sentences (through context coercion). The results of the three experiments support the situation approach. Strong correlations were noted between le' s meanings and situation type: native speakers of Chinese interpreted le as perfective when it occurred in dynamic situations, and as inchoative when it appeared in stative situations. However, situations and le's meaning could be coerced through context coercion. Additionally, context-coerced sentences were processed in real time more slowly than concord constructions. |
