Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Result states, telicity and boundedness: Evidence from event identification in Mandarin Chinese

This talk investigates the relationship between result states, telicity and boundedness with evidence from V de O clefts in Mandarin Chinese, a pattern involving both focus and eventuality. Analyzed as a special case of inverse copular sentences (Moro 1997), these clefts serve to specify/identify a bounded event (instead of an individual as in the prototypical cases). Crucially, the verbal particle de is argued to head an Asp*P (Ramchand & Svenonius 2014) and mark the boundedness/perfectivity of the event in focus. This approach to V de O clefts provides evidence for the necessity to distinguish between result states, result situations and entailed situations. I show that what is presupposed in these clefts is not necessarily the whole event, but can simply be the entailed situation, which amounts to the actual realization of the inherent result state in the case of telic predicates. Result situations, by contrast, cannot be presupposed by this focus construction. In other words, while result situations only bear pragmatic relevance (i.e., depending on context), result states and entailed situations are grammatically encoded: they are respectively associated with telicity and boundedness, which have been distinguished by many (e.g., Depraetere 1995).