The Situation Type And Aspectual Realization In Tu Jia Language

As a common language phenomenon,tenses and aspects have drawn many linguists'attentions both home and abroad.The researches on tenses and aspects of English and Chinese are various.This thesis mainly discusses the representation of situation types of Tu Jia language.As an extremely endangered minority language,Tu Jia language has disappeared in most of the Tu Jia area.It is urgent to record and protect this endangered language.Based on the author's observation,we found there are so many kinds of tenses and aspects in Tu Jia language,as many as 20 kinds.Compared with other languages,the representation of situation type in Tu Jia language shows its own characteristics.Through analysis of the verb classification of Tu Jia language,we found that each kind of verb of Tu Jia language has the same place with its corresponding English and Chinese verbs,as well as displays its unique characteristics.Since there are so many kinds of tenses and aspects in Tu Jia language,verbs in different situation types have their corresponding grammatical forms as well as lexical forms.This thesis aims to solve these problems:What is the representation of the situation types in Tu Jia language?What's the transition between lexical and morphological representation of situation type in Tu Jia language?What factors will affect this transition?Analysis of this article is based on Vendler's situation types.Vendler?1957?divided verbs into state verb,activity verb,accomplishment verb,achievement verb by adopting two standards:one is whether the action verbs can continue,and the other is whether the verbs have endpoints.According to the study of tenses and aspects of Olsen?1997?,she divided it into two categories:lexical aspect and grammatical aspect.Grammatical aspect expresses a view of the internal temporal constituency,which is classed as perfective or imperfective;while lexical aspect expresses the nature of the internal temporal constituency of the situation.On the basis of previous researches,we adopt some test tables of words and sentences to analyze the representation of four different types of verbs in Tu Jia language.Based on the analysis of the corpora of Tu Jia language,we found that different verb types do have different representations in Tu Jia language,and it can be concluded that in Tu Jia language these four kinds of verbs can express the nature of internal temporal properties of their verb stems,but some of accomplishments and achievements can also express the view of the internal temporality through grammatical aspect.In addition,we found that resultatives of Tu Jia language have their unique feature on the basis of the analysis of resultatives in Tu Jia language.For example,“broken,xa²¹ mo²¹ p^hi²¹ liau⁵⁵”and“cut down,ka⁵³ mo²¹ tie²¹ liau⁵⁵”.Through its unique representation feature“mo²¹”,we can easily take it apart from other verbs.This thesis tries to discuss the constitution of verb temporality of Tu Jia language on the analysis of the verb classification in Tu Jia language and its representations.This thesis is of great significance in protecting minority languages and preserving linguistic and cultural diversity.