汉语客体量变动词短语的层级分析

Abstract

Incremental theme “V + yi ‘a/one’ + CL + N” sequences in Mandarin Chinese exhibit dual telicity in that sometimes they have a completion interpretation and other times a termination interpretation. This paper shows that in Mandarin Chinese, incremental theme V + yi ‘a/one’ + CL + N sequences describe multi-point closed scalar changes (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010, among others), an aspectual class which subsumes the traditional concept of accomplishments (Vendler 1957). Furthermore, in light of recent findings in a scalar analysis of English incremental theme argument NPs (Kennedy 2012), we show that the ambiguous aspectual interpretations of events with incremental theme in Mandarin Chinese can be consistently explained by the scalar features lexicalized in their argument NPs. Furthermore, we will show that the scalar analysis has more explanatory power in accommodating the different types of NPs and different types of events denoting incremental changes than the previous approaches. The results of this study shed important light on the analysis of lexical aspect in Mandarin Chinese. 汉语中表达客体量变的结构“动+—+量+名” 可表达“完结” 和“中 止” 两种意义。本文认为该类结构描述的是多点闭合层级变化 (multi-point closed scalar change) (e.g. Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010 等），该变化属于一种新的情状类型，且包含传统的完结类事件 (accomplishments) (e.g. Vendler 1957)。此外，基于近年来学者对英语 中客体量变名词短语的分析(Kennedy 2012)，本文指出汉语中表达客 体量变的动词短语的“完结” 或“ 中止”意由该结构中论元名词短 语的层级特征(scalar feature)决定。本文还指出，与前人研究相比， 本文的层级分析不但能系统地解释客体量变，也能被应用到其他变 量事件中（即位移量变和状态变化量变）。