On the syntax of wan ‘finish/complete’ in Mandarin Chinese

ABSTRACT

In this study, I revisit the linguistic properties of wan ‘finish/complete’ in Chinese and provide a syntactic account. I demonstrate that wan is undergoing a process of grammaticalization from being a lexical item to a functional one. I also argue that because of this process, wan is found in different places in syntax. As a main predicate, it is projected in the head of the VP; in contrast, while functioning as a telic morpheme, it is in the head of the Inner Aspect Phrase between the vP and VP. This study sheds light on the Chinese aspectual system and suggests that Chinese uses at least two different mechanisms to mark telicity: resultative complements and overt telic morphemes.

KEYWORDS:

• Inner Aspect Phrase
• Chinese V–wan compound
• Chinese V–V resultatives
• grammaticalization

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I would also like to thank the editor for the valuable suggestions. Any remaining mistakes are mine.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Academia Sinica’s Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The abbreviations used in glossing are BA ‘light verb ba’, CL ‘classifier’, DE ‘particle de’, Imp ‘imperfective aspect’, LE ‘sentence-final le’, Prf ‘perfective aspect’ and Pro ‘progressive aspect’.

2 A judgement test on the use of the VO–wan cluster was conducted in March 2020, and 30 native speakers (from Mainland China and Taiwan) were tested. The results indicated that while some speakers completely rejected the VO–wan cluster, more than half of them accepted it. The inconsistency in judgement confirms the hypothesis that wan is undergoing a grammaticalization process.

3 An anonymous reviewer pointed out that some resultative complements are not compatible with a durative phrase, as illustrated (i):

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However, I would like to suggest that a sentence such as (i) is ruled out for pragmatic reasons. If a proper context is provided, the durative phrase can modify the same V–V compound, as illustrated in (ii):

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4 One of the main goals of Roberts and Roussou (2003) was to address how grammaticalization is realized in the syntax in the context of the Minimalist Program. More detailed discussion on their study is presented in §3.

5 An anonymous reviewer suggested that the potential ambiguity in the use of wan as a telic morpheme (or resultative complement) and as a one-place predicate, which denotes an undesirable outcome, should be addressed. The sentence in (i), taken from the reviewer, gives an example:

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However, I suspect that wan in (i) is in fact a shorter form of the two-syllable verb wan-dan ‘finish-egg’, as shown in (iia). See another example in (iib).

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Assuming that in a sentence such as (i) wan is a shorter form of a different verb, there is no potential ambiguity, and I leave the usages of wan-dan ‘finish-egg’ for future research.

6 Several different constructions related to telicity marking have been identified in the literature. Slabakova (2001) and Snyder (1995), for example, indicated that the following examples all have telic readings:

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7 The term ‘phase’ used in these studies is different from the one that is used in studies on the Minimalist Program, such as Adger (2003) and Chomsky (1995).

8 An anonymous reviewer indicated that the two possible readings of a V–wan compound (i.e. a resultative reading in (9) and a completive one in (10)) are due to different types of VPs that wan is interacting with – more specifically, due to different types of direct objects. It is stated that finishing drinking a bowl of soup naturally implies the soup is gone and finishing cleaning a room does not mean the room is gone but implies the result state that the room is completely cleaned. However, I would like to suggest that the cleanness of the living room in (10) is an implicature that can be cancelled. This is different from (9), where the result state is an assertion that cannot be cancelled. Compare (ia) and (ib):

Table

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As (ia) shows, the result state of the completeness of the direct object is an assertion and cannot be cancelled. In contrast, the cleanness of the direct object in (ib) is simply an implicature; therefore, it can be cancelled. The variation shown in the above two sentences suggests that wan has a dual function; therefore, I follow Lu et al. (2019) and Sybesma (2017) and assume that the ambiguity is mainly due to the status of wan although my analysis is different from theirs.

9 According to Liao (2015), the speech time is signalled by the sentence final le. As Li and Thompson (1981) pointed out, one of the functions that sentential LE has is to signal current relevance. It is then not unexpected that the speech time is used as the reference time. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

10 Qu Yuan (343–278 B.C.) was a Chinese poet who committed suicide by jumping into Miluo River.

11 The Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese is based on Mandarin Chinese used in Taiwan (i.e. Guoyu) and the Baidu Search Engine (Baidu knows) is a web-based search engine based in Mainland China, which provides users with a query-based searchable community to share knowledge and experience. The data taken from two different types of corpora from different Chinese-speaking regions as well as the results of the judgement test suggest that the VO–wan cluster is not an isolated phenomenon. As will be discussed in §3 and §4, the variations shown in a V–wan compound are the result of the grammaticalization of wan.

12 Because the cluster of VO–wan is not acceptable by some speakers, I used the symbol ‘#’ to indicate that these sentences are marginally acceptable. A more common way to say the two phrases is to place wan immediately after the verb and before the object. Alternatively, we can also duplicate the verb, and place wan after the duplicated verb to form a VOV–wan sequence.

13 The syntactic trees in (19) are adopted from Wu’s (2004) study.

14 Roberts and Roussou (2003) used a simpler syntactic structure and assumed that TP immediately dominates VP, and V directly moves to T when discussing the issue of the V-to-T movement in Middle English. However, they also indicated that a more complex structure such as [TP … [vP … [VP]]] can be adopted as well.

15 We will see some Russian examples in which the Inner Aspect Phrase is where a telic morpheme is projected. Travis (2010) also argued that Malagasy uses InAsp to mark telicity. As for the vP, Butt and Ramchand (2005) suggested that in Hindi-Urdu, several light verbs that are projected in the head of the vP may introduce telicity and argued that v may encode telicity information in some cases. Finally, studies such as Ramchand (2008), Snyder (1995), Tang (1997) and Zhang (2017) have illustrated that there is a functional phrase below VP that is responsible for the telic reading of a resultative complement.

16 I use [+SQA] to represent the semantic features of those nominal phrases that can delimit an event for the sake of simplicity. However, this feature is a little different from that of English. See Soh and Kuo (2005) and Woo (2018) for discussions of these additional semantic features.

17 Although Zhang (2017) did not specify the morphosyntactic property of R, it has functions similar to the null telic morpheme in Tang’s (1997) study.

18 As Travis (2010) suggested, functional morphemes in the (Inner) Aspect Phrase contain some idiosyncratic information, which is what many of these phase complements contain, as indicated by Li and Thompson (1981). I suspect that these phase complements may also be undergoing a grammaticalization process. For recent discussions on related issues, see Pots (2020) and Song (2019). I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to these two studies.

19 The first translation is Wu’s (2002) and the second is mine.

20 The reanalyzing process seems rather limited given that it only occurs when the Inner Aspect Phrase contains an overt morpheme such as wan.

21 Liao (2015) did not specify what “the salient part of the event” is. In his example (represented by (33c) here), it is stated that the salient part of the event is the time of Zhangsan’s graduation from high school (i.e. the end point of the main event). However, if my interpretation is correct, then the salient part of the event can be either the end point of the main event or the beginning point of the result state (as illustrated in (34b)).

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I-hao Woo

I-hao Woo received his PhD in Applied Linguistics at Boston University and is an assistant professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado Denver. His research has been focusing on theoretical Chinese linguistics as well as teaching Chinese as a foreign and second language.