汉语动词系统的界及其呼应:“了_(1)”完成体

Telicity and Agreement of the Chinese Verbal System:On the Chinese Perfective

汉语动词系统没有类似英语过去式和现在式时态(tense)的语法标记。在国际中文教学中,照搬外语语法,很容易无中生有,造成不必要的学习障碍。例如,动词词缀"了_(1)"表示完成(朱德熙,1982),却不是过去式标记,作为程序性的语法标记,标示与英语不尽相同的完成体(perfective)标记。完成体"了_(1)"编码语法意义不仅仅包含有界(沈家煊,1995;Smith,1997),而且是个呼应标记,和所在小句中的另一个界点标记相呼应(Sun&Teo,2017),确认完成终结点的位置。作者认为界点(telicity)是汉语动词系统的核心语法概念,汉语应用中现在与过去的解读,以及动名构式和界点的相关性(沈家煊,2004)都是在话语应用中的副现象(epiphenominal),不是汉语动词系统的核心语法概念。

Chinese verbs do not have the grammatical forms like those in English in signaling past tense or present tense.Simplistic uses of English grammatical concepts to explain Chinese grammar in teaching Chinese as a foreign language may lead to additional barriers in learning.Chinese verbal suffix-le signaling completion is not a past tense form.It is therefore a procedural perfective aspect marker different from the English past tense concept.The coded meaning of the Chinese perfective is not only telic(Shen 1995,Smith 1997),it is also a special agreement marker corresponding to an end point of a sentence.This paper claims that telicity is a basic grammatical concept in Chinese grammar.The concepts of“past”and“present”are epiphenominal in Chinese.