ABSTRACT
Chinese, which is recognized as an aspect, rather than a tense, language, draws overt distinctions between perfective events, those viewed as complete, and imperfective events, those viewed as incomplete.
Chapter 2 is devoted to a detailed exploration of the perfective system in Chinese, which consists of three subcategories: the perfective ‘-le’ and the sentence-final ‘le’ or the change-of-State ‘le’; the experiential ‘-guo’ and the delimitative aspect, formed by the reduplication of the predicate verb.
The perfective ‘-le’ presents a situation as a non-decomposable whole or as a closed one, rather than as open. The very notion of a holisticity justifies the concept that the situation viewed by ‘-le’ either has an inherent, natural final endpoint or an arbitrary endpoint, the latter is imposed by the perfective aspect (Brinton, 1988: 43; Smith, 1997). Actualization of a holistic situation with a final endpoint means completion of the situation. Therefore, the author argues that ‘-le’ emphasizes the notion of completion and result. ‘-Le’ applies to most of the situation types, though it has a preference for telic situations (Accomplishment, Achievement, and RVC/DVC), since the boundedness of these situations fits the perfective aspectual meaning of ‘-le’. When ‘-le’ interacts with stative verbs, the unbounded States undergo a transition and change into inchoative verbs. The sentence-final ‘le’ operates on a sentence which can contain any kind of situation type, it signals the actualization or the happening of the situation described by the whole sentence, which results in a change of State. The communicative function of ‘le’ is to indicate the current relevance of the new State to the context where the sentence occurs.
The experiential aspect ‘-guo’ is also available to all situation types as it signals that the situation viewed by ‘-guo’ happened at least once or repeatedly in the past, but the result of the situation is not focused on by ‘-guo’. Influenced by the Saussure’s semiotic or sign-oriented view of language, as adopted by Tobin in his study of the English aspect system, the author holds that the perfective ‘-le’ and the experiential ‘-guo’ form a perfective pair, and ‘-le’ is the marked perfective because of its emphasis on the notion of completion and result, and ‘-guo’ is the unmarked one because it is neutral to the notion of result.
The delimitative aspect, which is formed by the reduplication of the verb, indicates that an action is done a little bit. Delimitativeness or transitoriness is the core aspectual meaning of this aspect or verb reduplication, while other meanings, such as slightness, casualness, tentativeness are all pragmatic extensions of the essential meaning of the delimitative aspect.
