Abstract
It is observed that a pre-verbal morpheme TAU in the Xiaolongmen dialect indicates the moving of the subject to a specific location to perform an action at some time before the utterance time. Furthermore, the semantics of TAU conveys the following two essential implications: (1) The location of the subject must be non-coincident with the location of the event; (2) by the utterance time, the subject has already left this location and the involved action on a par have been completed or terminated. We argue that semantically TAU serves as a locative predicate which achieves event anchoring by utilizing the non-coincidence relationship between the event location and the location of the event initiator. Its past tense interpretation and the meaning of perfectivity thus result from the locative non-coincidence.
Xia Liu and Vincent Jixin Wang are co-first authors of the article.
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Notes
- 1.
213 is the tone value of morpheme TAU which corresponds to the classical tone category qu.
- 2.
Note that there exists another TAU-morpheme in Xiaolongmen, which appears clause-final and indicates the emergence of new situations rather than a past event / state; see more details in [3]. In this paper, we restrict the issue to the pre-verbal TAU.
- 3.
The boundary caused by TAU is not necessarily the culmination point in case of accomplishments: e.g., in (5b), TAU indicates that the washing event has been already terminated, but not necessarily completed; in other words, the one-piece clothing washing event can be finished or not finished.
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Liu, X., Wang, V.J. (2022). Perfectivity via Locative Non-coincidence: Pre-verbal TAU in the Xiaolongmen Dialect. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_29
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