A Study Of The Formal Representation And Semantic Properties Of Pluractionality In Chinese

The notion of pluractionality expresses the category of number in the verbal domain.Pluractionality is essentially about the events themselves being plural.In earlier cross-linguisct research on pluractionaliy,a typical pluractional has the plurality encoded in the form of the verb.With an increasing amount of literature expanding the coverage of the term ’pluractionliy’,event plurality is manifested by a special construction or some other element in the sentence than an affix on the verb.The present paper attempts to have a general discussion of pluractionlity,and mainly discuss the semantic properties of mandarin Chinese pluractionlity and the linguistic means by which it’s expressed in the frequentative aspect and the progressive aspect,hopefully to cause more research attention on mandarin Chinese.Based on the theoretical accounts of pluractionliy,this paper belongs to the line of research that focuses on the semantics of pluractionlity in mandarin Chinese,and mainly focuses on following questions:(1)What are the properties of pluractionlity in mandarin Chinese?(2)What is grammatical expression of pluractionaliy in mandarin Chinese?Following cross-linguistic theoretic research on pluractionality,we argue that Chinese pluractionality is essentially sum of basic units of event and incorporates three semantic components:distributive reading,cumulative reading and repetitive reading.These meaning components are expressed in different forms in terms of the frequentative aspect and of the progressive aspect.The frequentative expresses repeated events consisting of a set of bounded actions,and if the predicate express unbounded actions,the lexical aspect of which must be changed into that of expressing bounded events.Morpho-syntactically,the frequentative aspect sentence expresses these semantic components of plural events in forms of frequentative adverbs,classifier or verbal duplication,etc.In the expression of the progressive aspect,we argue that the pluractional meaning is caused by plural arguments and repetitive reading.