Perfective Aspect and Accomplishment Situations in Mandarin Chinese

Referentiality and incompletive reading in Mandarin

“…Just like in Hindi, Mandarin verbs of consumption and of creation have also been observed to allow incompletive readings in some situations in previous studies (Smith 1997;Soh and Kuo 2005;Koenig and Chief 2007;among others). However, these previous analyses sometimes disagree on when exactly such readings are allowed.…”

“…However, these previous analyses sometimes disagree on when exactly such readings are allowed. For example, on the one hand, according to Soh and Kuo (2005) as shown in (8), for consumption verbs in Mandarin, it is felicitous to assert that the event is incomplete when the object NP has a demonstrative but not when it has a numeral. Koenig and Chief (2007), on the other hand, show with an attested example from Google that the incompletive reading can be present even for NPs with a numeral as in (9).…”

“…And yet, many subsequent studies observe that definite NPs actually can have incompletive readings occasionally (cf. Soh and Kuo 2005;Rothstein 2008), without going further into details about the different completion entailment patterns of different types of definite NPs. To fill in this gap, I present the relevant data below in this section.…”

“…Based on a corpus analysis of Mandarin, Koenig and Chief (2007) show that accomplishment predicates with a quantized incremental theme with the form [Num + CL + N] can have a non-culminating reading (contra Soh and Kuo 2005). However, if we replace [Num+ Cl] with [Num+ Measure], the non-culminating reading disappears as in (1).…”

Mandarin Bare Classifier-Nouns: Towards a Universal Structure for Classifiers and Plurals

“…Zhangsan can in one year in build three-CL house / that-CL house 'Zhangsan can build three houses / that house in one year. ' The distinction between numeral and demonstrative nominals is also observed in Soh & Kuo (2005). They find that although the intuitive reading for accomplishment sentences with a numeral or a demonstrative nominal is a completed event, it is acceptable to add an assertion stating that the event is not completed when the sentence has a demonstrative nominal, but not so for a numeral nominal, as shown in (ii).…”