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The role of pragmatics in interpreting the chinese perfective markers -guo and -le [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]
Book Details
Author(s)H. Pan, P. Lee
PublisherElsevier
ISBN / ASINB000RR10Y6
ISBN-13978B000RR10Y9
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
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.
Description:
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.
