A multifactorial aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe in Mandarin
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Abstract
As a cognitive ability to construe events in alternate ways, aspectuality has aroused many researchers’ academic attention; however, the concatenation of aspect markers in a clause is understudied in previous studies. The present paper follows a bidimensional approach of aspect to conduct a corpus-based aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe (henceforth VCIMs zhe) in Mandarin. Specifically, to construe the cognitive inference mechanism of aspect, a multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe by the statistical techniques of multiple correspondence analysis, conditional inference trees and conditional random forests is carried out to explore the prototypical temporal features of verbs in two slots, predict the aspectual meanings of two imperfective markers zhe, and also discuss the conditional importance of factors such as durativity, dynamicity, telicity, boundedness, and slot in identifying the situation types of two verbs or verb phrases in VCIMs zhe. Methodologically, a usage-based multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe complements previous introspective studies on aspect marking. Theoretically, a corpus-based aspectual account of VCIMs zhe, one type of complex viewpoint aspects, expands traditional studies on Chinese aspect system, supplies evidence for aspect typology cross-linguistically, and provides reference for second language acquisition of usage patterns of zhe by non-native speakers.
Funding source: The National Social Science Foundation Project of China “A Diachronic Typological Study on the Chinese Resultatives of Macro-event”
Award Identifier / Grant number: 21BY045
Acknowledgments
The authors sincerely thank three anonymous reviewers and the editors for their insightful comments and suggestions for improvement. As ever, all errors in the writing belong to the authors.
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Research funding: This study was funded by the National Social Science Foundation Project of China “A Diachronic Typological Study on the Chinese Resultatives of Macro-event” (Award Number: 21BY045, PI: Fuyin Li)
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Data availability statements: All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this article and its supplementary information files.
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Supplementary Material
This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0080).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
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- Metaphorical language change is Self-Organized Criticality
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- Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Coalescence and contraction of V-to-Vinf sequences in American English – Evidence from spoken language
- Metaphorical language change is Self-Organized Criticality
- A corpus-based quantitative study of numeral classifiers in Nepali
- They worked their hardest on the construction’s history: Superlative Objoid Constructions in Late Modern American English
- Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English
- Seeing the wood for the trees: predictive margins for random forests
- A multifactorial aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe in Mandarin
- To drop or not to drop? Predicting the omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future construction
