The Syntax And Semantics Of The Aspectual Marker ’[开]Kai’ In Weifang Dialect

This thesis investigates the syntax and semantics of the aspectual marker-kai in Weifang dialect under the framework of Generative Grammar.In Weifang dialect,-kai can act as an ingressive aspectual particle to denote the meaning of beginning.It also can work as a complement to express the state of an object.The syntactic environment that the two occur in are different to each other.This thesis follows the research direction of New Descriptivism proposed by Hu(2018)and makes a micro-description to the syntax and semantics of the aspectual marker-kai and the complement-kai.Then based on the performance,the syntactic status of-kai will be studied in this paper.The findings are illustrated in the following.Firstly,in the V+-kai+O construction in Weifang dialect,the form of object makes a difference to the grammatical meaning of-kai.Specifically,when the object position is occupied by Bare Noun or Proper Noun which performs as object in sentence,-kai works as an ingressive marker and denotes the beginning of a new state or a specific event.According to the syntax and semantics performance as well as the adhesiveness of-kai,this thesis proposes that-kai locates in the head Asp P of the functional category in tree diagram,and takes VP as its complement.-kai attracts the verb below in the VP branch to move up and merge with it to form the V+-kai construction.Then the right word order of a sentence forms.Secondly,when the object position of the V+-kai+O construction is occupied by Determiner Phrases,the V+O+-kai construction turns to the V+-kai+(-liao)+DP construction which is unsimilar to the original one.-kai not only expresses the ingressive meaning but also performs as a complement.The specific grammatical meaning of-kai depends on the semantic relationship between the verb and DP in a sentence.If there is a constructed relationship between the verb and DP,-kai will act as an ingressive marker denoting the beginning of an event.And if there is a consumption relationship between the verb and DP,-kai will perform as a complement describing the state of object.And-liao in Weifang dialect is the transformed pronunciation of verb-final-le in Mandarin Chinese.-liao located after-kai which can be omitted without making difference to the semantic of the whole construction.From the perspective of syntactic status,-kai locates in the complemental position.In other words,-kai sticks to the verb and they together occupy the V position of VP.The function head-liao will attract V+-kai to move up and form the V+-kai+-liao construction.Then the right form of the whole legal sentence is generated.The V-O+-kai construction in Weifang dialect is an original form in the process of grammaticalization.In the V-O+-kai construction,-kai acts as an ingressive aspectual marker and represents the beginning of an event.Superficially,there is no obvious difference between the V+-kai+O construction and the V+O+-kai construction,except for the word order.In fact,there is a huge distance between the two constructions.The object in V+O+-kai construction is much limited and only bare noun can take the object position.The construction also has a high requirement towards the relationship between the verb and the object.The verb and object in the V-O+-kai construction must be of high tight and can be used as a verb.In such a situation,this thesis proposes that V+O should be viewed as a V-O phrase or syntactically a V-O compound.In V-O+-kai construction,-kai works as an ingressive aspectual particle and indicates the beginning of an event.As for the syntactic status,this thesis holds that-kai takes the head position the function category Asp P,and V-O compound locates in the V position of VP,then the V-O compound will be attracted to move up and merge with-kai.Then a grammatical sentence is generated.This A+-kai construction is of high frequency in use in Weifang dialect.And it is very common for adjectives to act as predicate in both dialects and Mandarin Chinese.Therefore,the thesis prefers to view the category of adjective as trans-class verb,which also consists to its actual performances.In A+-kai construction,-kai is acting as an ingressive aspectual marker that representing the gradual change of state that denoted by the adjective.Besides,the construction gives an interpretation of the contrast and comparison between the current state and the original state.What is various to Mandarin Chinese is that only qualitative adjective can be allowed to take the A position.It is ungrammatical for state adjective to occur in the construction.Based on the syntactic and semantic performance of-kai,this thesis considers that-kai generates in the head of Asp P,then merges with the moving up A to form the right patten A+-kai.From the perspective of semantics,there is no obvious relationship between the pure aspectual particle-kai and the complement-kai.However,according to the diachronic researches of-kai,the two are homologous.