An Analysis Of Completion And Incompletion Effects Of Incremental Theme Verb Predicates In English And Mandarin

This thesis investigates temporal interpretation of English and Mandarin incremental theme verb predicates used with perfective aspect.Telic incremental theme verb predicates in English can only have completion reading when used in perfective aspect while those in Mandarin can have both completion and incompletion(termination)reading.These two phenomena are referred to as completion effect and incompletion effect,respectively.Previous studies have identified three factors relevant to the temporal interpretation of incremental theme verb predicates,namely,the telicity feature of incremental theme verbs,the boundness feature of their incremental theme and the semantics of tense and perfective aspect.However,they have not reached a consensus regarding the derivation mechanism of completion and incompletion effects.To deepen our understanding of this these phenomena,this thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the mechanism of completion effect in English?(2)Among the three factors that contribute to the temporal interpretation of incremental theme verb predicates used with perfective aspect,which factor/factors contribute(s)to the different temporal interpretation patterns between English and Mandarin?(3)What is the mechanism of incompletion effect in Mandarin?The first research question aims to find out the derivation mechanism of the completion effect in English.Based on Lin’s(2004)semantic implicature analysis,Smith’s(1991/1997)interaction of accomplishment and perfective aspect analysis,and Yang’s(2011)overlapping of two endpoints analysis,we proposed a two-steps analysis of the completion effect.In our analysis,the completion reading is derived from two steps:First,the zero perfective aspect marker(?)brings both the starting point and terminal point of the situation in view.Second,the past tense marker-ed locates what is in view in anterior to speech time.Because the relative anteriority status of the situation’s endpoint cannot be canceled,the completion reading is un-cancellable.The second research question aims to identify the source of different temporal interpretation patterns of incremental theme verb predicates used with perfective aspect in English and Mandarin.We reviewed representative studies which attribute the source to the three factors respectively:1)Tai’s(1975,1984)verbal system analysis,2)Suo and Kuo’s(2005)nominal system analysis,and 3)various types of perfective system analyses which attributes the source to the semantics of verbal le.To settle the dispute,we provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic and syntactic structure of incremental theme verb predicates using the first phase syntax system(Ramchand,2008)as analytical framework.Based on our analysis,both English and Mandarin incremental theme verbs are atelic and the boundness feature of English and Mandarin incremental themes are not different.Thus,we concluded that it is the different tense and aspect system that contributes to the different temporal interpretation patterns.The third research question aims to find out the derivation mechanism of the incompletion effect in Mandarin.We argued for the realization of process aspect analysis(Lin,2017;Shi,2017)which holds that verbal le only expresses the realization of the process aspect of the relevant events indicated by the verbs plus lexical expressions specifying the quantity of the objects involved without any indication of whether the events are completed or not.Then,we expanded this analysis by making explicit that the completion and incompletion readings of Mandarin incremental predicates are derived via pragmatic implicature,which serves as an additional evidence that the semantic information of Mandarin relies much on pragmatic information.In sum,this thesis provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the derivation mechanism of the completion effect in English and incompletion effect in Mandarin.Compared with previous research,this thesis made a systematic analysis of the telicity features of incremental theme verbs and the boundedness feature of incremental themes by using the first phase syntax as analytical framework,which provides us with a new perspective to understand incremental theme verb predicates.In addition,this thesis adds new evidence to the understanding that Mandarin is a pragmatic language and English a grammatical one.While the semantic information of Mandarin relies much on pragmatic implication,that of English depends more on grammatical deduction.