| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 91 === Aspectual and Morphological Status of —zhe
Chih-hsiang Shu
Graduate Institute of Linguistics
National Tsing Hua University
Abstract
The aspectual marker —zhe has many puzzling and seemly non-related properties in the literature. Linguists by far have not gain much insight into these properties so they are generally disjunctively defined in the literature: imperfective marker, durative marker, stative marker, resultative marker, phase marker with attachment meaning, aspectual markers with non-progressive meaning, aspectual markers that appears most often in narrative discourses, and an adverbial clause marker. To give all the functions of —zhe a uniformed account, a thorough morphsyntactic analysis is necessary. Following Kimura (1983) and others, I propose that there are at least two morphosyntactic forms of —zhe: the phase marker —zhe and the aspectual marker —zhe. I will then define each morpheme in terms of their semantic features and examine how the different feature specifications of these two forms of —zhe accounts for their distinct morphosyntactic properties, and how the various seemly unrelated properties can be accounted for uniformly.
In addition, this thesis focuses on a key property of the aspectual —zhe: its inability to anchor tense. This property better accounts for the seemly stative-like properties accounted for in the literature.
(1) ?? Ta chi-zhe fan. (2) Ta yi-bian chi-zhe fan, yi-bian kan-zhe shu.
he eat-ZHE meal he one-side eat-ZHE meal one-side look-ZHE book
‘He eat-ZHE meal.’ ‘He is eating while reading a book.’
(3) Laoban pai-zhe zhuozi ma ren.
boss pound-ZHE table scold people
‘The boss, pounding the table, scolded someone .’
I propose that the unacceptability of (1) follows from the inability of —zhe to anchor to tense. The acceptability of other sentences is the result of elements that are capable of ‘tense anchoring’. This tense anchoring property will be discussed extensively in the final chapter, which has important consequences on the syntactic and semantic theories of tense and aspect.
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