Introduction

Abstract

AbstractStudies on Chinese aspect are carried out by two groups of people. The first group focuses on the functionalities of the aspectual markers 着 zhe0 ‘ZHE’, 了 le0 ‘LE’ and 过 guo4 ‘GUO’, and the other focuses on classification of situation types. However, very few studies are concerned with the relations between the aspectual markers and situation aspects. Among the limited studies on situation aspect of Chinese, there are still issues remaining. This thesis describes a theoretical framework for aspectual classification with the combination of an ontological view of human perceived events/situations and the ways of how different types of situation are described in Chinese language with a particular viewpoint. For example, some aspectual verbs, such as 开始 kai1shi3 ‘start’, 结束 jie2shu4 ‘end’, 继续 ji4xu4 ‘continue’, 停止 ting2zhi3 ‘stop’, 完成 wan2cheng2 ‘finish’ and so on, are such linguistic operators that are used to shift the view to a part of a situation. I will show that the aspectual markers着 zhe0 ‘ZHE’, 了 le0 ‘LE’ and 过 guo4 ‘GUO’ are also devices that can shift the viewpoint of situations. This chapter describes the scope, goals, methodology and other related issues of the study. It also describes the organization of the whole thesis.