BEAL Forum 6. Plenary Session 3. 
Date: Friday, 18 October 2024
Time: tba
Venue: Virtual event via Zoom, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
Professor Qianping Gu
Southeast University, Nanjing
“Telicization of Resultative Morphemes in Mandarin Chinese”
Abstract: Empirical findings have shown that the counterparts of dynamic verbal predicates across languages exhibit variations regarding their aspectual interpretations, in particular, a culmination reading that is expected for accomplishments predicates (e.g., drink a glass of water) does not always obtain for all languages. For these languages that exhibit non-culmination accomplishments, they usually implement additional grammatical forms to telicize the predicates, ensuring endpoints obtained for the denoted events. (Mandarin) Chinese is one such language. In this talk, I focus on a productively used construction in Chinese known as Resultative Verb Compound (RVC, 动结式), which was discussed in previous studies as a grammatical form comparable to culmination-entailed accomplishments. The inventory of the resultative morphemes is fairly large and thus it is impossible to exhaust them all in this talk. Instead, I will focus on three resultative morphemes that are commonly used for describing consumption events, namely, –wan (完), –diao (掉), and –guang (光). While presenting some intuitively available semantic readings associated with each of the three morphemes, I will also show how we may analyze the telicization effects they bring out in a formal semantic framework (i.e., the homomorphical approach by Krifka 1989, 1992, 1998), capturing their nuances in forming event structures that give rise to culmination entailment.
Bio: Professor Qianping Gu received her BA in English and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Southwest University (China), an MA in Linguistics from The University of Manchester, and her PhD in Linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin, with a major in Syntax & Semantics and a minor in Language Documentation. Her main research interest is semantics. She investigates lexical aspect mainly out of general linguistic theoretical concerns (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) but also looks into the acquisition of lexical aspect in additional language acquisition. In addition to the investigation of standard Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua), she is also interested in other Chinese varieties.
Free and Open to the Public
Organizers:
BEAL Forum 6 Organizing Committee
Faculty Co-Chairs: Mineharu Nakayama, Marjorie K.M. Chan, and Zhiguo Xie
Graduate Student Co-Chairs: Paul Ueda, Ka Fai Law, Yuki Hattori & Saori Wakita
Committee Members: tba
Sponsors:
East Asian Studies Center, Graduate Association of Chinese Linguistics (GACL), Graduate Students of East Asian Languages and Literatures (GREALL), Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), and other OSU units.
This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center, programming fund for GACL from the Council on Student Affairs, and by the James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund.