An Aspectual Analysis of BA

Abstract

The ba construction has been widely discussed in theliterature; however, so far no analysis provides a satisfactoryaccount for all of the distributional properties of ba. Thispaper considers the ba construction from an aspectual point ofview. I argue that the ba predicate describes a bounded event.Whether an event is bounded in Chinese may depend on situationtype only, or it may depend on both situation type and the aspecta situation is presented in. As for the ba NP, it is specific inthe sense of Liu (1990). I further argue that the two properties-- boundedness and specificity -- are related. There is adependency between the ba argument denotations and the eventdescribed by the predicate, and this dependency can becharacterized in terms of a structure-preserving function -- ahomomorphism. The relation preserved is the 'all of' relation. Onthis view boundedness and specificity are simply differentmanifestations of the same property that is inherent in themeaning of a ba predicate. The ba construction is thus shown tobe an example of how aspectual considerations constrain both thepredicate and an NP argument in Chinese.