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.
