City University of Hong Kong CLASS CLASS
Making Sense of Grammar
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asked Jun 20, 2021 in Questions about Chinese Grammar by Ariel (34,480 points) | 145 views

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The temporal schema of an Achievement is:

- - - - I F - - - - - (R)

‘I F’ means the overlapping of the initial and final points. (R) Signifies the result  brought about by the happening of an Achievement, or a change of state. The broken line represents a preliminary and resultant stage of an Achievement. Take‘sǐ’ (die) as an example, the preliminary stage of ‘sǐ’ is expressed in Chinese by the construction ‘Tā kuàiyào sǐ le’ (She was going to die), the resultant stage is the resultative state of ‘being dead’.

[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
answered Jun 20, 2021 by Ariel (34,480 points)

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