Modeling Temporal Progression in Mandarin Chinese

This book discusses how to determine temporal relations between sentences with aspect markers in a discourse in Mandarin Chinese. The author examines the four aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese: the progressive zai, the durative zhe, the perfective le and the experiential guo. Following Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, which proposes that temporal relations are determined by rhetorical relations, the author argues that, based on its aspectual semantics, an aspect marker indirectly influences temporal relations in two ways: First, it specifies a defeasible rhetorical relation, which in turn determines a temporal relation; second, it sets up a temporal constraint to be obeyed by the temporal relations specifid by the rhetorical relations which connect the sentences together.

Autorentext

Jiun-Shiung Wu received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A., May 2003. He is an associate professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, National Chiayi University, Chiayi, Taiwan. His research interests include formal semantics, computational semantics, formal pragmatics, LFG and syntax-semantics interface.