2019.10.16 Prof. Chaofen Sun

Stanford University

Beijing Language and Culture University

City University of Hong Kong

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The Perfective 了1 in Modern Standard Chinese: Contexts and Degree

The verbal suffix了1 has been treated as an aspect marker (Wang 1965) meaning “perfective”完成 (Chao 1968, Lu & Zhu1979, Smith 1997), “realization”实现 (Liu 1988), or “complete” (Chen 2008), etc. No matter what it is named, its semantics is related to the semantic notion of boundedness. Wu (2005) proposed a SigP to account for 了1’s distributions. However, such a claim fails to explain why the 了 in 我吃完*(了)⼀一碗饭 “I have eaten a bowl of rice” is obligatory as the event with the RVC 吃完 is necessarily bounded. Tsai’s (2008) multi-level account claims that only Asp1 在 and 过 as head of the TP (了1 is Asp2) allows a sentence to stand without a quantified NP as its syntactic object. However, such a claim misses the fact that #我吃过饭 is just as awkward as #我吃了了饭. Both of these sentences cannot stand without a quantified NP or additional information. My study shows that the Chinese perfective marker (Li & Thompson (1981) is actually not as robust as the Russian perfect because of an agreement constraint that is pragmatically motivated. Evidence will be given that when the main predicate of a sentence is not in focus, such an agreement constraint does not apply. That is, although 散步 “take a walk” is a good VP, #我散了步 is bad because of the violation of the agreement constraint with a quantized objective NP when the predicate is in focus as in 我散了了半⼩小时的步 “I took a walk for thirty minutes” is good. It follows that when a sentence has a narrow focus (Lambrecht 1994, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), i.e., the predicate is not the focus of the sentence) 我在海海边散了了步 “I took a walk at the beach” but the locative “at the beach”. In the case the syntactic object need not be quantized. Such a systematic agreement is totally missed in the available literature on the Chinese perfective. The contribution of this study is that the Chinese perfective is rather weak because there is a pragmatically motivated agreement with a quantized object, or other degree bearing linguistic forms. Additional data will be demonstrated to show how sentence-final 了2 and other constructions can satisfy such an agreement constraint where there is a predicate focus in a Chinese sentence.