A multifactorial aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe in Mandarin

Abstract

Abstract As a cognitive ability to construe events in alternate ways, aspectuality has aroused many researchers’ academic attention; however, the concatenation of aspect markers in a clause is understudied in previous studies. The present paper follows a bidimensional approach of aspect to conduct a corpus-based aspectual analysis of verb concatenation with imperfective markers zhe (henceforth VCIMs zhe) in Mandarin. Specifically, to construe the cognitive inference mechanism of aspect, a multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe by the statistical techniques of multiple correspondence analysis, conditional inference trees and conditional random forests is carried out to explore the prototypical temporal features of verbs in two slots, predict the aspectual meanings of two imperfective markers zhe, and also discuss the conditional importance of factors such as durativity, dynamicity, telicity, boundedness, and slot in identifying the situation types of two verbs or verb phrases in VCIMs zhe. Methodologically, a usage-based multifactorial analysis of VCIMs zhe complements previous introspective studies on aspect marking. Theoretically, a corpus-based aspectual account of VCIMs zhe, one type of complex viewpoint aspects, expands traditional studies on Chinese aspect system, supplies evidence for aspect typology cross-linguistically, and provides reference for second language acquisition of usage patterns of zhe by non-native speakers.