Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study.

Xiao, R. Z. and McEnery, A. M. (2004) Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study. Studies in Language Companion Series . John Benjamins. ISBN US 1 58811 601 8 / Europe 90 272 3083 8

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Abstract

Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.

Item Type:
Book/Report/Proceedings
Additional Information:
Hardbound 1 58811 601 8 / USD 138.00 90 272 3083 8 / EUR 115.00
Uncontrolled Keywords:
aspect ; Chinese ; corpus
ID Code:
56
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
17 Jun 2005
Refereed?:
No
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
10 Jun 2019 18:21