A Study On Compound Aspect Sentence And Its Telicity In Mandarin Chinese

The issue of telicity attracts much attention all the time.Related researches by scholars at home and abroad are countless.However,a majority of discussions are focused on verb telicity.Simultaneously,telicity feature on single aspect rather than compound aspect arouses fierce discussions.Guided by the theory of Aspectual Classes and Transformation Generative grammar,based on sentences from BNC and the website http://www.aihanyu.org/cncorpus/Cn Cindex.aspx,this thesis aims to handle following questions:.1.What are the representing ways for expressing compound aspect in Mandarin Chinese? 2.What are the telicity determining approaches in Mandarin Chinese with a compound aspect? 3.How can we explain telicity feature from syntactic and semantic aspect?Compared with previous studies,systematic representing approaches are presented in this thesis,and researching filed on the telicity feature has also been expanded.Firstly,this article rearranges and summarizes the ways of representing compound aspect in Mandarin Chinese.System-functional linguistics believe that representing approach is mainly distinguished by form and meaning.We refine the classification criteria,and hold that grammatical and lexical devices are leading approaches for purpose of expressing compound aspect in Mandarin Chinese.In terms of grammatical aspects,co-occurrences of aspectual markers,homogenous and heterogeneous compound aspect,homomorphic complexes and heteromorphic compound aspect are main approaches;Lexical devices include aspectual time adverbs and aspectual verbs whose selections depend on its own feature when forming a compound aspect.Secondly,ending-point approach plays a vital role in determining telicity.A new approach,event type determining method,will be introduced into this thesis.To be specific,a hole event possess a atelic feature while a plug and a filter own atelic respectively.It should be noted that apart from any other influential factors,predicative component is recognized as a major factor for determining telicity feature in a sentence.Finally,the thesis straightens out a syntactic derivation of compound aspect and a syntactic tree will evident that aspectual marker of pro-verb plays a pivotal role in determining telicity feature of predicate components or even a sentence.What’s more,this thesis puts forward a compositional rule and claims a critical function of strong telic feature when determining telicity from the perspective of semantics.At the same time,we must figure out whether a finish or an end point appears in sentence on account of the former representing a true completed event.Lastly,the tendency of following information provides a value for determining telicity as well.Chinese is an aspectual prominent language.With regard to compound aspect representations,this thesis explores the representing approaches in Chinese and judging methods,as well as syntactic and semantic interpretation of the telicity feature.The research on compound aspect expressions and its telicity feature is novel.We wish it provide a new direction and inspiration on telicity feature and compound aspect researching.