標題: Temporal reference in Mandarin Chinese
作者: Lin, JW
交大名義發表
National Chiao Tung University
公開日期: 1-七月-2003
摘要: This paper discusses how Chinese, a so-called tenseless language, determines its temporal reference. For simplex sentences without time adverb or aspectual marker, I show that temporal reference is correlated with aktionsart or grammatical viewpoint. For sentences with an aspectual marker, I discuss the temporal semantics of le and guo in detail, showing how their tense/aspectual meanings contribute to temporal reference. I propose to analyze le as an event realization operator and guo as an anteriority operator. For subordinate clauses, I show that temporal reference of complement clauses of verbs is basically determined by verbal semantics of individual verbs, which may impose some temporal restriction on the temporal location of the embedded event. As for relative clauses and temporal adverbial clauses, many different factors such as lexical verbal semantics, referential properties of determiners, lifetime effect of noun phrases, semantic or pragmatics constraints on temporal connectives, inference rules and world knowledge, etc., all interact to help determine temporal reference. Many data discussed in this paper indicate that there is not evidence of (covert) tenses in Chinese. Therefore, challenging work remains for those who have claimed that Tense Phrase is projected in Chinese phrase structures.
URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1023665301095
http://hdl.handle.net/11536/27064
ISSN: 0925-8558
DOI: 10.1023/A:1023665301095
期刊: JOURNAL OF EAST ASIAN LINGUISTICS
Volume: 12
Issue: 3
起始頁: 259
結束頁: 311
顯示於類別:期刊論文