Telicization of Resultative Morphemes in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Empirical findings have shown that the counterparts of dynamic verbal predicates across languages exhibit variations regarding their aspectual interpretations, in particular, a culmination reading that is expected for accomplishments predicates (e.g., drink a glass of water) does not always obtain for all languages. For these languages that exhibit non-culmination accomplishments, they usually implement additional grammatical forms to telicize the predicates, ensuring endpoints obtained for the denoted events. (Mandarin) Chinese is one such language. In this talk, I focus on a productively used construction in Chinese known as Resultative Verb Compound (RVC, 动结式), which was discussed in previous studies as a grammatical form comparable to culmination-entailed accomplishments. The inventory of the resultative morphemes is fairly large and thus it is impossible to exhaust them all in this talk. Instead, I will focus on three resultative morphemes that are commonly used to describe, though not limited to, consumption events, namely, -wan (完), -diao (掉), and -guang (光). While presenting some intuitively available semantic readings associated with each of the three morphemes, I will also show how we may analyze the telicization effects they bring out in a formal semantic framework (i.e., the homomorphical approach by Krifka 1989, 1992, 1998), capturing their nuances in forming event structures that give rise to culmination entailment