The use of LE 了 in Mandarin Chinese oral discourse

LE is the mostly widely studied aspect markers in Chinese. In addition to perfective aspect marker to indicate action completion, LE can also serve as sentence final particle to indicate a currently relevant state. This study investigates how Chinese NSs use LE in oral discourse and the factors that influence their use. The data were collected from three discourses including informal conversations, elicited narratives, and teacher classroom speech. Multivariate analysis of 2,359 tokens revealed that verb complement type and verb type have the strongest effects, followed by LE position, serial verb relationship, sentence type, discourse context, and time word presence/absence.

Reconstructing the development of the aspect marker te ‘to acquire’ in Southwestern Yuè: a missing link between Yuè and Hakka

This paper provides a synchronic description and reconstructs the developmental pathway of the aspect marker te in four Southwestern Yuè dialects of Chinese, located in far western Guǎngdōng. Synchronically, te functions as a perfective aspect marker and a perfect aspect marker (similar to Mandarin Chinese le but different from Cantonese zo). Diachronically, te is believed to have been transferred from the neighboring Hakka dialects through substratum influence. We argue that te is grammaticalized from the verb dé 得 ‘to acquire,’ of the Hakka dialects. This study reveals that the aspectual use of te is an essential part of a missing link between Yuè and Hakka. Cet article offre des descriptions synchroniques et reconstruit la voie de développement du marqueur aspectuel te dans quatre dialectes chinois de Yuè du sud-ouest, qui se trouvent à l’extrême-ouest de la province de Guǎngdōng. Synchroniquement, te fonctionne à la fois comme un marquer aspectuel du perfectif et du parfait (comparable à le en chinois mandarin mais différent du zo en cantonais). Diachroniquement, nous pensons que te a été emprunté des dialectes voisins de Hakka, et ainsi subi d’une influence de substrat. Nous argumentons en faveur de l’origine Hakka de te : il est grammaticalisé du verbe dé 得 qui signifie ‘acquérir’ dans les dialectes Hakka. Cette étude révèle que l'usage aspectuel de te joue un rôle essentiel du lien manquant entre les groupes dialectaux de Yuè et Hakka.

Family Resemblance and the Syncretism of Reflexive Marks: The Case of Georgian.

Georgian verbal pre-radical vowel -i- raises many issues for generative and cognitive approaches to the syncretism of reflexive marks. The vowel bears medio-passive functionalities (Nash, 2002), occurring also in full reflexives (Amiridze, 2006) and as a perfective aspect marker for atelic verbs (Holisky, 1981). In this paper I show that any analysis based in valence reduction - the most obvious path for accounting for this kind of phenomenon - is uncapable of foreseeing the distribution of -i-. Alternatively, I propose that the vowel is distributed according to a Wittgensteinian Family Resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit) set.

Acquisition of Chinese Aspect

This study investigates the acquisition of Chinese aspect markers of -le, -guo, and -zhe by English-speaking learners at the university level. The speech and written data produced by students at two different levels of proficiency were collected, compared and analyzed. The results show that English-speaking learners of Chinese acquire the perfective aspect marker -le and the past experience marker -guo before the durative aspect marker -zhe. The process by which learners acquire the aspect markers appears be meaning-based and can be summarized into: 1) looking for logical temporal sequences; 2) using time adverbials and conjunction for the time references; 3) using lexical aspects and word meanings; and 4) using pragmatic cues with the aspect markers of -le and -guo. Learners, especially at the lower level of proficiency, rely more on the time adverbial expressions and lexical aspects than learners at the more advanced level.