The Syntax And Semantics Of Aspect In Xinhua Dialect

Aspect has always been an important issue of syntax and semantics.There are plenty of theories about Aspect such as Comire(1 976)'s classic Aspect theory,Smith(1991)'s two-component theory and Binnick(1991)and Michaelis(1998)'s three-component theory etc.While in the field of Chinese linguistics,Aspect is considered as a grammatical category which is investigated and talked a lot from kinds of perspectives of syntax,semantics,pragmatics,the interface of the three and typology.As a dialect of MC,Xinhua dialect belongs to Lou-Shao District of old Chinese Xiang and possesses peculiar phonetical,morphological and grammatical characters as a consequence of ethnic immigration and fusion in history.Xinhua dialect is an Aspect-prominent language which has a total of ten Aspect markers,each bearing its own syntactic and semantic representations.Under the framework of syntax and semantics,based on the definition and typological description of Aspect in Comire(1976)and the uniform temporal phrase structure of Tense,Aspect and time adverbs proposed by Demirdache&Uribe-Etxebarria(1997a,1997b,2004),this study takes the relevant example sentences of verbal particles in Luo Xinru(1998,2000a)as major corpus data and explores the syntactic and semantic representations about Xinhua dialect's Aspect.In such a way it answers the following two research questions:(1)What are the ten Aspect markers'syntactic representations?and(2)How to re-categorize them into Retrospective Aspect,Prospective Aspect and Progressive Aspect according to the ten aspectual markers' semantics?In response to these questions,a proposal is raised that Aspect in Xinhua dialect is attributed to grammatical category.After analysis of the data from Luo(1998,2000a),the thesis summarizes the positions where every aspectual marker in Xinhua dialect appears and finds they all occur as suffixes of predicate verbs and adjectives with specific grammatical meaning.When these semantic components break into corresponding temporal phrase structures,aspectual markers become dyadic spatiotemporal predicates which order their internal and external arguments in relations of BEFORE,WITH(IN)and AFTER.Finally,the thesis arrives at the three re-categorizations of Retrospective Aspect,Prospective Aspect and Progressive Aspect.If our analysis is on the right track,then Aspect in Xinhua dialect belongs to the viewpoint Aspect(also called grammatical Aspect)of Smith(1991)'s two-component theory,that is,a unity of grammatical forms and grammatical meanings.Retrospective Aspect includes Experiential marker ku and Perfect marker li,ka,ka-li and ti which denote completion or termination of an action;Progressive Aspect is composed of Inceptive t(?)'i and Durative to and t(?)'i;Prospective Aspect contains ?a-t(?)i which signals transitoriness and ko(k'a)which designates both transitoriness and a tentative try.Moreover,this study may shed light on the study of Aspect in other dialects and minority languages.