The role of pragmatics in interpreting the chinese perfective markers -guo and -le  

Oleh:

Pan, H. ; Lee, P.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 36 no. 3 (Mar. 2004), page 441-446.
Topik: Perfective Markers; States; Totality/Partiality; Discontinuity/Continuation; Repeatability/ Reversibility; Change-out -of-state; Implicatur e; Chines e
Fulltext: Pan_H.pdf (459.69KB)

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It is claimed in the literature that the perfective marker -guo has the following semantic properties: discontinuity, repeatability/reversibility, and partiality, which contrast with the continuation and totality properties of the perfective marker -le. Previous analyses adopt a purely semantic approach to account for the above properties of -guo and -le, and the role played by pragmatics is not recognized. In this paper, we argue that the purely semantic approach is not adequate, and show that both semantics and pragmatics play a role in the interpretation of -guo and -le, which motivates us to propose a semantic-pragmatic account to explain the properties of guo- and le-sentences in Chinese. Following previous analyses like Smith’s (1997), we treat the basic semantics of both -guo and -le as presenting a perfective viewpoint. However, unlike previous studies, we claim that the so-called semantic properties demonstrated by the two markers are all pragmatic implicatures. After revisiting the three properties discussed in previous studies, we suggest replacing discontinuity and repeatability/ reversibility with the new property ‘‘change-out-of-state’’ while keeping the totality/partiality property. We propose to determine the selection of -guo and -le by a pragmatic condition when semantics imposes no restriction on their co-occurrence with the predicate in question:If the speaker wants to emphasize a change out of state and/or partial realization of the situation, -guo will be preferred, but -le will be a better alternative, if the speaker wants to emphasize continuation of the resultative state and/or total realization of the relevant situation.

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