The Semantics of Chinese Imperfective-zhe(着):A Cross-linguistic Study
This study explores the semantics of a Chinese imperfective marker-zhe from a cross-linguistic perspective under the framework of situation semantics,aiming to see whether it has the interpretations of French and Russian imperfectives.It is found that Chinese imperfective-zhe and French and Russian imperfectives all share the habitual,ongoing and continuous readings.However,Chinese imperfective-zhe lacks the progressive reading characteristic of both French and Russian imperfectives,the preparatory and narrative usage of French imperfectives,and the factual usage of Russian imperfectives.Adopting the hypothesis that imperfectives share a unified semantic core cross-linguistically,this study argues that imperfective-zhe is a universal quantifier over situations.The semantic similarities and differences among the imperfectives in the above three languages arise from the restrictions on their quantified situations,which are in turn caused by the respective grammaticalization paths.To be specific,imperfective-zhe has a continuous reading when co-occurring with stative predicates and expresses an ongoing reading when following activity predicates,which are all attributed to different contextually-determined or linguistically-determined restrictions on situations in the quantificational domain formulated by different modal bases.Because a progressive marker is generally grammaticalized into an imperfective marker cross-linguistically with the former extending to denote the continuous and habitual readings,imperfective markers are typically associated with progressive,continuous and habitual interpretations.However,imperfective-zhe is special in that it lacks the progressive meaning,which may be due to the fact that it has not grammaticalized enough to accommodate telic predicates in the grammaticalization from expressing a continuous reading to conveying an ongoing reading.Further,during the grammaticalization from a progressive marker to an imperfective marker,-zhe firstly went through the stage of co-occurring with individual-level state verbs to convey a continuous reading and then extended to denote the habitual meaning.However,in modern Mandarin Chinese,the degree of grammaticalization of imperfective-zhe is still relatively low,and the habitual meaning has not yet been differentiated,which is therefore seldom used without the help of elements like temporal or quantificational adverbials.The language-specific grammaticalization path of imperfective-zhe accounts for its limited usage in quantified situations,which is manifested in the linguistically-determined options of modal bases and possible interpretations available to imperfective-zhe.
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