The Description and Implementation of Chinese Aspect System

Guowen Yang

FB10, Sprach-und Literaturwissenschften

Bremen University, 28334 Bremen, Germany

The research presented in this dissertation is composed of mainly three parts. One part of the work is to give a full systemic description of Chinese aspect system which is shown in a grammatical network with all relevant entry conditions and realization rules. The system not only contains simple aspect forms, but also all possible complex aspect forms on which no much investigation was done in previous research. The second part of the work is to make semantic analysis of each aspect form in terms of temporal logic theories that was also not deeply explored in this area before. In the research, much work is done on looking into the intrinsic temporal relations of both simple aspect forms and complex forms, especially on investigating, analyzing, and generalizing the semantic conditions for the combination of different aspect forms to explain the compatibility of aspect pairs. The third part of the work is to implement the system in the KPML multilingual generator to generate Chinese sentences. In the generation, the temporal relations of aspect forms are taken as semantic inputs. Under the guidance of entry conditions, the grammatical network is traversed, proper grammatical features are selected, and sentences in expected aspect forms are generated. In the dissertation, most of existing achievements on the topic are referred, quoted, and analyzed. Comrie’s theoretical framework of aspect and Vendler’s claim of situation types are typically used in analyzing the properties of each individual aspect form. The research is supervised by Professor John A. Bateman of Bremen University, Germany.