The Chinese Aspectual System

The Chinese Aspectual System

Author: Hongzhi Xu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9811634084

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book presents a theoretical study on aspect in Chinese, including both situation and viewpoint aspects. Unlike previous studies, which have largely classified linguistic units into different situation types, this study defines a set of ontological event types that are conceptually universal and on the basis of which different languages employ various linguistic devices to describe such events. To do so, it focuses on a particular component of events, namely the viewpoint aspect. It includes and discusses a wealth of examples to show how such ontological events are realized in Chinese. In addition, the study discusses how Chinese modal verbs and adverbs affect the distribution of viewpoint aspects associated with certain situation types. In turn, the book demonstrates how the proposed linguistic theory can be used in a computational context. Simply identifying events in terms of the verbs and their arguments is insufficient for real situations such as understanding the factivity and the logical/temporal relations between events. The proposed framework offers the possibility of analyzing events in Chinese text, yielding deep semantic information.


Aspect in Mandarin Chinese

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese

Author: Richard Xiao

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9789027230836

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Parameter of Aspect

The Parameter of Aspect

Author: C.S. Smith

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 9401579113

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Ă–sten Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.


A Reference Grammar of Chinese

A Reference Grammar of Chinese

Author: Chu-Ren Huang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1316395251

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Reference Grammar of Chinese is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the linguistic structure of Chinese, covering all of the important linguistic features of the language and incorporating insights gained from research in Chinese linguistics over the past thirty years. With contributions from twenty-two leading Chinese linguists, this authoritative guide uses large-scale corpora to provide authentic examples based on actual language use. The accompanying online example databases ensure that a wide range of exemplars are readily available and also allow for new usages to be updated. This design offers a new paradigm for a reference grammar where generalizations can be cross-checked with additional examples and also provide resources for both linguistic studies and language learning. Featuring bilingual term lists, this reference grammar helps readers to access relevant literature in both English and Chinese and is an invaluable reference for learners, teachers and researchers in Chinese linguistics and language processing.


The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

Author: Ping Li

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 3110800713

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.


The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar

The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar

Author: Yuzhi Shi

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9789027230621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.


Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles

Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles

Author: Jian Kang Loar

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780815367109

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

1. Basic background knowledge -- 2. The perfective aspects in Chinese -- 3. The imperfective aspects in Chinese -- References -- Index.


Perspectives on Aspect

Perspectives on Aspect

Author: H. J. Verkuyl

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-11-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781402032301

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.


Tense and Aspect in Han Period Chinese

Tense and Aspect in Han Period Chinese

Author: Barbara Meisterernst

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 3110339544

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many grammatical issues of Archaic and Medieval Chinese still lack a comprehensive analysis. The book provides the first thorough investigation of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the linguistic categories tense and aspect and their relation with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese. The author uncovers fascinating details of a language with a highly restricted verbal morphology.


A Grammar of Gan Chinese

A Grammar of Gan Chinese

Author: Xuping Li

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1501507265

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

China is very rich in language resources, and Mandarin is undoubtedly its most prestigious and well-known representative. Unfortunately, most of these languages remain understudied or even unstudied. Such is the case of Yichun Gan. Written in the style of a reference grammar, this book sets out to give a comprehensive and systematic description of Yichun grammar, with the aim of increasing readers' knowledge about Chinese languages other than Mandarin. In addition to common categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, the volume attempts to cover as many grammatical categories and constructions as possible, including the Sinitic-specific categories such as classifiers, the aspect system, postpositions and the object-marking BA constructions. To highlight its uniqueness, the book adopts a comparative perspective to contrast many features of Yichun Gan with Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. Our study shows that Yichun Gan possesses both Northern and Southern Chinese traits in many constructions, which supports its status as a transitional language. It will be of interest to linguists who wish to learn more about East Asian languages, and more specifically Sinitic languages.