This book presents a theoretical study on aspect in Chinese, including both situation and viewpoint aspects. Unlike previous studies, which have largely classified linguistic units into different situation types, this study defines a set of ontological event types that are conceptually universal and on the basis of which different languages employ various linguistic devices to describe such events. To do so, it focuses on a particular component of events, namely the viewpoint aspect. It includes and discusses a wealth of examples to show how such ontological events are realized in Chinese. In addition, the study discusses how Chinese modal verbs and adverbs affect the distribution of viewpoint aspects associated with certain situation types. In turn, the book demonstrates how the proposed linguistic theory can be used in a computational context. Simply identifying events in terms of the verbs and their arguments is insufficient for real situations such as understanding the factivity and the logical/temporal relations between events. The proposed framework offers the possibility of analyzing events in Chinese text, yielding deep semantic information.

Autorentext
Hongzhi Xu received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Department, University of Pennsylvania. He is now an assistant researcher at the Institute of Corpus Study and Application, Shanghai International Studies University. He has published important papers on ACL, COLING, and various aspects of linguistics and computational linguistics.

Inhalt
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. What is Aspect1.1.1. Definition of Aspect1.1.2. Studies on Chinese Aspectual Markers1.1.3. Studies on Aspectual Classification1.1.4. Situation Aspect vs. Viewpoint Aspect1.2. The Goal of the Study1.3. Methodology1.4. Thesis Organization
Chapter 2. Previous Studies2.1. Situation Aspect and Vendler's Classes2.2. Aspectual Classification2.2.1. Feature-Based Methodology2.2.2. The Conceptual Structure2.2.3. The Generative Lexicon2.2.4. MARVS2.3. Diagnostics for aspectual classification2.4. Difficulties in Aspectual Classification2.4.1. Degree Achievements2.4.2. More than Degree Achievements2.4.3. Achievement vs. Accomplishment2.4.4. The term 'telicity'2.4.5. Intention and Perception2.5. Aspectual Studies on Chinese2.6. Summary
Chapter 3. Event Structure and Event Types3.1. Ontological Situation Types3.1.1. Representation of Ontological Situation Types3.1.2. Progressive is Stative3.1.3. Primitives of Events3.1.4. Theoretically Existing Situation Types3.2. Linguistic Events3.2.1. Viewpoint Aspect3.2.2. Linguistic Event: Combination of Situation and Viewpoint Aspect3.2.3. What expresses the ontological situations and what to classify?3.3. Where Is Telicity From?3.3.1. Intentionality3.3.2. Result3.3.3. Perception and Prediction3.3.4. Context3.3.5. Summary of Telicity3.4. Linguistic Event Types3.4.1. Static State: |----|3.4.2. Dynamic State: |~|3.4.3. Change of State: |3.4.4. Semelfactive: |~|3.4.5. Accomplishment: |~|3.4.6. Instantaneous Accomplishment: |~|3.5. Constructions and Their Aspects3.5.1 Resultative Verbal Complements (RVCs)3.5.2. Resultative DE construction3.5.3. Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs)3.5.4. V+(ZHE/LE/GUO)+O+(LE)3.5.5. BA construction3.5.6. BEI construction3.6. Summary
Chapter 4. Semantics of Aspectual Markers and Negators in Chinese4.1. Introduction4.2. Aspectual Operators4.3. LE4.3.1. LE with static state4.3.2. LE with dynamic state4.3.3. LE with accomplishment4.3.4. LE with achievement4.3.5. The Two LEs: LE1 and LE24.3.6. LE is not a tense marker4.3.7. Non-Aspectual LE4.4. zhe0 'ZHE', zai4 'ZAI' and zheng4zai4 'ZAI'4.4.1. The difference of zai4 'ZAI' and zheng4zai4 'ZAI'4.4.2. The Difference of Static State with and without ZHE and their relation with Negators4.4.3. The difference of ZHE and LE in existential sentences4.5. guo4 'GUO'4.5.1. Grammaticality and World Knowledge4.5.2. Time Frame of GUO4.5.3. The Truth Condition of GUO4.6. Negations4.6.1. bu44.6.2. mei2you34.7. Summary
Chapter 5. Formal Representation of Aspect5.1. Introduction5.1.1. Second Order Logic5.1.2. Predicates and Parameters5.1.3. Class, Instance and Subclass5.1.4. Attributes, Functionalities and Habits5.1.5. Instances of Situations5.1.6. Multi-modal Predicates in Natural Language5.2. The Basic Predicates Related to Time<div&g...