1. Introduction
Languages vary synchronically in the ways they encode conceptual categories such as tense, aspect and modality (i.a., Comrie 1976; Bybee et al. 1994; Bhat 1999; Binnick 2012). Major axes of variation are the degrees of obligatoriness and systematicity of expression. A well-known construction illustrating this point is the English Progressive, which is systematic in its composition (i.e., be V-ing), cf. (1a), and obligatory for ongoing situations vis-à-vis the simple form of the verb, cf. (1b). Lower on these axes—at least when it comes to progressivity—is Dutch, which allows a simple present verb for an ongoing situation, cf. (2a), and has at least two progressive constructions: the prepositional progressive (aan het VINF zijn) in (2b), and the posture progressive (zitten te VINF) in (2c). Since (2a–c) may all translate to (1a), Dutch encodes progressive aspect in a less obligatory and systematic way than English does (cf. Bertrand et al. 2022 for a similar juxtaposition of the English and Dutch present perfect constructions).
| (1) | a. | Rosie is eating a sandwich. |
| b. | *Rosie eats a sandwich. | |
| (2) | a. | Rosie eet een broodje. |
| b. | Rosie is een broodje aan het eten. | |
| c. | Rosie zit een broodje te eten. | |
| ‘Rosie is eating a sandwich.’ |
Advances in the accessibility and searchability of large-scale parallel corpora (cf. Barlow 2008; Cysouw and Wälchli 2007; Dahl 2007, 2014) have made it possible to exploit this type of crosslinguistic variation heuristically, remedying a basic methodological problem: identifying the means of expression for a conceptual category in a language that does not (evidently) encode that category obligatorily or systematically. By working with parallel translation corpora of languages on opposite ends of these axes, the obligatoriness and systematicity of expression in one language can help to discover the equivalent means of expression in the other—using the source language, in other words, as a probe for the target language.
This particular application of parallel corpus methods—which builds upon corpus-based contrastive linguistics (CCL: i.a., Aijmer et al. 1996; Johansson 2007; Granger and Lefer 2020), Translation Mining (TM: i.a., van der Klis et al. 2017, 2020, 2021; de Swart et al. 2022) and multiple parallel text analysis (MParT: i.a., Lu and Verhagen 2016; Lu et al. 2018; Knotková and Lu 2020)—has been called heuristic translation mining (HTM: Bogaards 2019a).1 HTM is a useful instrument in the linguist’s toolkit for both descriptive and theoretical questions. Descriptively, HTM may point the researcher in the direction of means of expression they were not aware of. And theoretically, HTM may contribute to understanding more precisely how languages vary in how they encode grammatical concepts, which may in turn inform general theories about those concepts by broadening their empirical basis.
The probing perspective HTM capitalizes on is not new; the idea has some precedent in CCL in particular. What distinguishes HTM from CCL, though, is that HTM specifically seeks out languages that are maximally divergent in terms of optionality and systematicity of expression of a given grammatical concept. This provides empirical input for theories working from the assumption that crosslinguistic variation is constrained by universal ordering principles, for instance the cartographic framework (Cinque 1999 et seq.) and generative approaches to the syntax–semantics interface (i.a., Travis 2010; Ramchand 2018). The connection between parallel corpus methods and this type of theoretical work is underdeveloped, and HTM can be seen as a subtype of CCL particularly suited to bridging this gap. This paper is part of a larger research project aiming to make this connection.
The aim of this paper is thus to expand the scope of HTM. It does so by applying it to viewpoint aspect in Mandarin Chinese and Dutch. As an aspect-oriented language, Mandarin has a set of verbal particles encoding particular types of viewpoint aspect (i.a., Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981; Yang 1995; Dai 1997; Xiao and McEnery 2004; Wiedenhof 2016; Zhao 2022). Dutch is on the other end of the spectrum, with periphrastic aspectual expressions—like those in (2b,c)—characterized by optionality and limited systematicity (cf. Boogaart and Bogaards forthcoming).
The present study takes two Mandarin viewpoint aspect markers and examines how they are translated to Dutch in a specially assembled parallel corpus drawing on five Mandarin novels and their Dutch translations. The two selected aspect markers are 起来 -qilai and 下去 -xiaqu, which encode “ingressive” (also called “inchoative” and “inceptive”) and “continuative” (also called “successive” and “continuous”) aspect, respectively.2 These particular types of viewpoint aspect were chosen because they vary in conceptual complexity yet are similar enough to be compared and operationalized simultaneously—that is, using the same conceptual building blocks.
This study innovates in three ways vis-à-vis previous studies applying (H)TM or MParT. First, two distinct conceptual categories are involved at once rather than just one; examples of the latter include parallel studies into motion events (Verkerk 2014), speech representation (Verhagen 2012), indefinite pronouns (Beekhuizen et al. 2017) and definiteness (Bremmers et al. 2021). Working with two types of aspect makes it possible to compare the (non-)marking of each type as a proxy for obligatoriness in the target language.
Second, the types of viewpoint aspect under study differ conceptually from previous (H)TM studies into viewpoint aspect, which operate at the level of the perfective–perfect and perfective–imperfective distinctions (Dahl 2014; van der Klis et al. 2017, 2020, 2021; Bogaards 2019a). I will try to show that ingressivity and continuativity can be incorporated in a parallel corpus study by defining internal-temporal templates based on selection theory (Bickel 1997).
Third, the aspect markers under study are low-frequency expressions, so rather than extracting a set number of sentences featuring a given aspect marker from one novel (van der Klis et al. 2020, 2021) or a number of novels (Bogaards 2019a), this study is based on a corpus of five full novels, amounting to almost 30,000 translation pairs. Working with a corpus of this size is an attempt to work out the scale necessary to apply HTM to forms with lower frequency.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 goes over the basic assumptions of HTM, its relation to other types of parallel corpus research, and two issues raised by the design of this study. Then, Section 3 reviews previous research on viewpoint aspect in Dutch, aiming to give an overview of the expressions already known to be tied to ingressivity and continuativity. Next up are the Mandarin aspect markers: in Section 4, the aspectual values encoded by 起来 -qilai and 下去 -xiaqu are described on the basis of Mandarin reference grammars and previous studies, and operationalized such that (i) it is clear how they carve up the aspectual domain within their ‘native’ system and (ii) they can be uniformly applied to the target language. Section 5 reports on corpus assembly and annotation and Section 6 presents the results: a discussion of the types of ingressive and continuative aspect marking found in a non-aspect-oriented language like Dutch, and a comparison of (non-)marking frequency of these types of viewpoint aspect. Section 7 concludes by giving an overview of the ‘discovered’ means of expression and reflecting on methodological and theoretical points raised by the study.
2. Heuristic Translation Mining
At its core, heuristic translation mining (HTM) involves systematically studying parallel corpus items—i.e., original and translated language material aligned sentence-by-sentence—with the aim of identifying means of expression in the language of translation (Lu and Verhagen 2016, p. 12; Bogaards 2019a, p. 161). This section starts out by reviewing HTM’s basic assumptions and relating the method to similar parallel corpus approaches. Then, I raise two additional issues: selecting conceptual content and discourse type (discourse vs. narrative), and the relation between parallel and non-parallel corpora.
2.1. Basic Assumptions
HTM takes several basic assumptions from multiple parallel text analysis (MParT), specifically regarding sensibility, heterogeneity and asymmetry. These principles both overlap with and deviate from corpus-based contrastive linguistics (CCL) and translation mining (TM). The sensibility assumption bears on the text producers of the parallel corpus material: the translator, faced with the task of verbalizing the conceptual content from the original text in the language of translation, is assumed to come up with sensible strategies to complete this task (Lu and Verhagen 2016, p. 170). In this sense, HTM treats translations as large surveys with a limited number of respondents.3
An intervening factor is crosslinguistic heterogeneity: languages vary in the means of expression they offer their speakers; they may “provide different conventional construals” (Verhagen 2012, p. 1). Especially at the level of grammatical notions such as viewpoint aspect, the consequence is that (aspect) marking in the original need not entail marking or even equivalent construal in the translation. Corpus annotation for HTM, therefore, requires labels for ‘unmarked’ and ‘untranslated’ items (Bogaards 2019a, pp. 170–73).4 These labels have direct counterparts in corpus-based contrastive linguistics (CCL), namely, ‘zero correspondence’ and ‘divergent correspondence’ (Johansson 2007, pp. 25–26).
The third basic principle drawn from MParT pertains to the methodological status of the languages under study, which is asymmetrical: the source language (here: Mandarin) is used to gather new insights about the target language (here: Dutch), not the other way around. This is because conceptual content (here: ingressive and continuative aspect) is defined in terms of particular formal manifestations in one language. Naturally, the analysis can be reversed afterwards, by assembling a new corpus drawing on, for instance, Dutch original texts and Mandarin translations. But this requires a separate, extra step; in its basic application, HTM is a “one-way street” (Bogaards 2019a, p. 162). In this sense, HTM has a narrower focus than CCL, which treats translations with caution but does generally pursue bidirectional comparison (e.g., Xiao and McEnery 2004; Johansson 2007). HTM’s monodirectionality is in line with its focus on maximally divergent expression—in the present case, aspect-oriented versus non-aspect-oriented languages.
HTM shares with MParT its emphasis on the detailed qualitative analysis of parallel sentence pairs as a way of getting a grip on crosslinguistic variation. However, it aligns with TM in that it also seeks to quantify the corpus data, contrary to MParT. The main difference between HTM and TM is the monodirectionality discussed previously, which TM does not apply as strictly. TM starts out by identifying a crosslinguistic formal category (or a set of them), for instance, the have-Perfect in Germanic and Romance languages (Dahl 2014; van der Klis et al. 2017, 2020, 2021). The goal is then to study the crosslinguistic variation of this category based on differences in distribution, visualized by means of multidimensional scaling (van der Klis and Tellings 2022). Conceptual content is thus not defined in terms of one or more forms in one language, but by forms shared by all languages under study—based on the initial observation that the same form exists across these languages. By extension, TM does not pursue HTM’s heuristic goals: rather than ‘discovering’ new means of expression in one language, TM aims to map the distribution of known ones in several languages. Hence, TM and HTM are complementary approaches: they map different things.
2.2. Conceptual Content and Discourse Type
It is well known that aspect may interact with discourse type (de Swart 2007). In the case of Dutch, use of the Perfect (vis-à-vis the Simple Past) depends on whether one is dealing with narrative or non-narrative discourse (Boogaart 1999; Le Bruyn et al. 2019; van der Klis et al. 2020, 2021).5 In the English and Dutch data collected by Le Bruyn et al. (2019, p. 168), the Perfect only shows up in non-narrative discourse, never in narrative discourse. The question is whether this restrictive interaction is a property of viewpoint aspect in general, or of subtypes like (im)perfectivity in particular. In the present case: do ingressivity (i.e., construing the start of a situation) and continuativity (i.e., construing the continuation of a situation) depend on this discourse-level distinction for their realization?
One known way of realizing ingressivity and continuativity in Dutch is with the (semi-)auxiliaries beginnen ‘start’ and blijven ‘stay’, respectively (cf. Section 3). They can be used in both narrative sequencing, as in (3), and non-narrative dialogue, as in (4).
| (3) | a. | Toen begon Kailyn te zingen. |
| ‘Then Kailyn started to sing.’ | ||
| b. | Vervolgens bleef ze maar zingen. | |
| ‘After that she just kept on singing.’ |
| (4) | a. | “Wat doe je in de keuken?’’ “Ik ben begonnen met lunch maken.” |
| ‘”What are you doing in the kitchen?” “I’ve started making lunch.”’ | ||
| b. | “Schilder je nog?” “Ja, ik ben blijven schilderen tijdens de pandemie.” | |
| ‘“Are you still painting?” “Yes, I kept on painting during the pandemic.”’ |
The difference between (3) and (4) lies not in the expression of ingressivity/continuativity (by beginnen and blijven in both cases), but in the tense marking on these verbs: simple past in (3), present perfect in (4). If one abstracts away from the viewpoint contributed by the tense markings in these clauses, then the construal and formal realization of ingressivity and continuativity in (3) and (4) are stable: beginnen and blijven mark initial and continuative points regardless and are therefore not sensitive to discourse type.
The more general point is: interaction with discourse-level distinctions such as ‘narrative/non-narrative’ seems to depend on the specific aspectual categories under study. While the Dutch Perfect is restricted to non-narrative discourse, there is no reason to suspect that ingressivity and continuativity are as well. For this reason, this study will not make this distinction in the corpus annotation, contrary to previous (H)TM studies, which deal with (im)perfectivity (e.g., Le Bruyn et al. 2019; Bogaards 2019a).
2.3. Parallel and Non-Parallel Corpora
Parallel corpora have their limitations: they are largely comprised of translated discourse, which is different from non-translated discourse (e.g., Vandevoorde et al. 2016), and they are restricted in size by the limited availability of high-quality translations. To make this more tangible: the (large) corpus assembled for the present study, consisting of five full novels, contains 413,094 Dutch tokens. By comparison, the SoNaR corpus of written Dutch (Oostdijk et al. 2013) contains more than 500 million—a ratio of roughly 1 to 1200. SoNaR also covers a variety of genres, whereas the corpus assembled here draws only on novels. For these reasons, HTM is said to produce results with strictly hypothetical status (Bogaards 2019a, p. 188), that is, hypotheses of the type “beginnen is a frequent ingressive marker in Dutch”, which are to be tested on a larger amount of non-translated linguistic data. A related point is that these hypotheses are likely not exhaustive; due to the limited size and composition of parallel corpora, there is always the possibility that certain means of expression were missed by the heuristic.
In HTM, parallel and non-parallel corpora should thus be used side-by-side. Two interrelated studies illustrating this point are Bogaards (2019a, 2019b): the former investigated the imperfective domain in Dutch by using the Mandarin imperfective marker 着 -zhe in a parallel corpus, which among other things yielded the construction ‘posture verb + past participle’ (e.g., begraven liggen ‘lie buried’); the latter then examined the construction’s meaning and restrictions on its productivity by examining about 8000 attestations from the SoNaR corpus. In the same vein, this study aims to produce testable hypotheses concerning ingressivity and continuativity in Dutch.
3. Ingressive and Continuative Aspect in Dutch
What is already known about ingressive and continuative aspect in Dutch? After presenting a very general definition of these types of viewpoint aspect, this section will survey the means of expression associated with them in the literature.
According to Dik and Hengeveld (1997, pp. 221–25), ingressivity and continuativity belong to a particular subtype of viewpoint aspect, namely, phasal aspect distinctions. Phasal aspect operates on situation aspect (e.g., States, Activities in the sense of Vendler 1967) in that phasal distinctions divide situations up into “phase[s] of development […] in terms of beginning-continuation-end” (Dik and Hengeveld 1997, p. 221).6 The ingressive viewpoint focuses on the first of these, i.e., the initial temporal boundary; and the continuative viewpoint focuses on a temporal point somewhere in between the initial and terminal boundaries.7 Dik and Hengeveld (1997, p. 225) provide the simple English examples in (5) to illustrate these general definitions.8
| (5) | a. | Ingressive | ‘John started crying.’ |
| b. | Continuative | ‘John continued crying.’ |
Having formulated a working definition of these types of viewpoint aspect, we will turn to previous treatments of these notions in Dutch grammar.
3.1. Ingressivity in Dutch
The Syntax of Dutch (Broekhuis et al. 2015; Broekhuis and Corver 2015) discusses the verb beginnen ‘start’ from (3) and (4) as an “inchoative”—which is interchangeable in this context with “ingressive”—verb, as well as the “aspectual verbs” gaan ‘go’ and komen ‘come’ combined with a bare infinitive (Broekhuis et al. 2015, pp. 150–56). These verbs take either a VP-complement (e.g., gaan lopen ‘begin walking’) or TP-complement (e.g., beginnen te lopen ‘begin walking’). They also mention verbs that do not take a VP- or TP-complement, namely, aanvangen met ‘commence with’ and overgaan tot ‘take to’. These other verbal expressions (except overgaan tot) are mentioned by Vandevoorde et al. (2016, p. 136) as well, who also add een aanvang nemen ‘commence’, starten ‘start’ and aanvatten ‘commence’.
A more elaborate category of ingressive markers in Dutch is described in the general reference grammar Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (ANS: Haeseryn et al. 1997): the prepositional pattern shown previously in (2b), which combines with the main verb zijn ‘be’ to encode progressive aspect, may also be licensed by other verbs to encode ingressivity—simply called “starting” in the ANS (Haeseryn et al. 1997, pp. 1048–54). This pattern is called the ‘aan het-construction’. The ingressive verbs licensed by the construction subdivide into causative and non-causative forms; (6) illustrates both: krijgen ‘obtain’ in (6a) is causative, slaan ‘hit’ in (6b) non-causative.
| (6) | a. | De docent krijgt zijn leerlingen aan het lezen. |
| ‘The teacher gets his students to start reading.’ | ||
| b. | De leerlingen slaan enthousiast aan het lezen. | |
| ‘The students enthusiastically start reading.’ |
Van Pottelberge (2004, pp. 27–51), Booij (2010, pp. 146–68) and Bogaards (2020a, pp. 59–92) further developed the ANS classification. Van Pottelberge noted that certain modal verbs get an ingressive reading when used in this construction.9 Table 1—which covers part of the full classification in Bogaards (2020a, p. 88)—lists the 14 verbs with ingressive meaning in this construction, subcategorized by causativity and modality.
A final construction linked to ingressivity is the verb worden ‘become’ in its function as a “change-of-state copula” (Hanegreefs 2004). Worden selects an adjectival or nominal complement (e.g., boos worden ‘become angry’, vader worden ‘become a dad’) and construes the beginning of the state denoted by the adjective or noun.10
Summing up, the literature mentions five strategies for ingressivity in Dutch:
Beginnen ‘start’ + te + VINF;
Gaan ‘go’ and komen ‘come’ + VINF;
Ingressive verb set (Table 1) + aan-PP;
Change-of-state copula worden ‘become’ + A/N;
Other verbal strategies: aanvangen met ‘commence with’, overgaan tot ‘take to’, een aanvang nemen ‘commence’, starten ‘start’, aanvatten ‘commence’…
3.2. Continuativity in Dutch
The verb set of which the ingressive verbs in Table 1 are a subset also includes two continuative verbs: blijven ‘stay’ and its causative counterpart houden ‘hold’ (Haeseryn et al. 1997, p. 1050). They are illustrated in (7).
| (7) | a. | De docent houdt zijn leerlingen aan het lezen. |
| ‘The teacher keeps his students reading.’ | ||
| b. | De leerlingen blijven enthousiast aan het lezen. | |
| ‘The students keep on reading enthusiastically.’ |
The verb blijven ‘stay’ also combines with a VP (rather than a PP), e.g., blijven lezen ‘keep on reading’ (Broekhuis and Corver 2015, pp. 1019–20), and as a copula similar to worden, e.g., boos blijven ‘stay angry’ (Broekhuis and Corver 2015, p. 796). Another verb that Broekhuis and Corver mention, again in passing, is vervolgen ‘continue’ (Broekhuis and Corver 2015, p. 695). Finally, there is the ‘expressive en maar-construction’, which encodes continuativity while evaluating the continuation negatively (Broekhuis and Corver 2017; Anthonissen et al. 2019, pp. 1148–50). An example from Broekhuis and Corver (2017, p. 311) is given in (8).
| (8) | En maar leugens verspreiden! Houd daar toch mee op! |
| ‘You just keep on spreading lies! Stop doing that!’ |
In sum, we can find five types of strategies in the literature for encoding continuativity in Dutch, three of which involve blijven ‘stay’:
Blijven +
VINF ;Continuative copula blijven + A/N;
Continuative verb (blijven or houden ‘hold’) + aan-PP;
En maar + VINF;
Other verbal strategies: vervolgen ‘continue’…
4. Operationalizing Viewpoint Aspect
This section aims to operationalize the viewpoint-aspectual values encoded by Mandarin 起来 -qilai and 下去 -xiaqu for HTM corpus annotation. This is no trivial task for two reasons. First, both heuristic elements are polysemous and have several uses besides their aspectual ones. These meanings need to be teased apart and accounted for during annotation. Second, corpus annotation based on the markers’ aspectual meaning must be transparent and consistent. This is only possible if the conceptual content under study is made explicit and applicable. At the end of this section, I will propose that one way of doing so is by working with viewpoint-aspectual templates defined by temporal boundaries and phases. Before that, I will go into the non-aspectual and aspectual semantics of -qilai and -xiaqu. Items from the corpus will be used as examples. (See Supplementery Matertials).
4.1. Non-Aspectual Uses
As aspect markers, both -qilai and -xiaqu derive from lexical verbs denoting movement (Wu 2000). Synchronically, they still exist as lexical verbs with opposite meanings in terms of spatial direction: qilai ‘stand up’ and xiaqu ‘go down’, see (9) and (10) below.11
| (9) | 哦，小夕，你刚起来吗？ | ||||
| O, | Xiaoxi, | ni | gang | qilai-ma? | |
| oh | Xiaoxi | you | Just now | ||
| ‘Oh | Xiaoxi | did you only get up just now?’ | |||
| (10) | 可是我哭着下去找他。 | |||||
| Keshi | wo | ku-zhe | xiaqu | zhao | ta. | |
| but | I | cry- | search | him | ||
| ‘But I went downstairs crying to look for him.’ | ||||||
A closely related use is as directional “Resultative Verb Compounds” (Li and Thompson 1981, pp. 58–65; Cherici 2019), i.e., directional RVCs, where -qilai and -xiaqu attach to a main verb and specify the situation denoted by that verb to involve completed upward or downward movement (see (11) and (12)). It is easy to see how these types of spatial movement relate to ‘standing up’ and ‘going down’.
| (11) | 小染想跳起来。 | ||
| Xiaoran | xiang | tiao-qilai | |
| Xiaoran | want | jump- | |
| ‘Xiaoran wanted to jump upright.’ | |||
| (12) | 吴敏把头低了下去，没有答腔。 | ||||||
| Wu | Min | ba | tou | di-le-xiaqu, | meiyou | daqiang | |
| Wu | Min | take | head | bow- | not.have | answer | |
| ‘Wu Min bowed his head down, and didn’t answer.’ | |||||||
Abstracting away from ‘up’ and ‘down’, -qilai and -xiaqu may also function as RVCs without directional meaning (Xiao and McEnery 2004, pp. 227–28; Xiong 2017, p. 51). In these cases, they indicate not completed movement but completed event (see (13) and (14)).
| (13) | 我的两只手被捆绑起来吊了两天。 | |||||||||
| Wo | de | liang | zhi | shou | bei | kungbang-qilai | diao-le | liang | tian. | |
| I | two | hand | by | bind- | hang- | two | days | |||
| ‘They had bound my hands together and left me hanging like that for two days.’ | ||||||||||
| (14) | 只是看也不看地咽下去。 | ||||||
| Zhishi | kan | ye | bu | kan | de | yan-xiaqu. | |
| only | look | also | not | look | swallow- | ||
| ‘She swallowed everything without looking.’ | |||||||
For -xiaqu, these are all non-aspectual types. But for -qilai there is one more category, which Xiong (2017) terms “semantically opaque qilai”, covering cases where “it is hard to flesh out the semantic contribution of qilai” (Xiong 2017, p. 51). This category covers multiple types, including impersonal and evaluative uses (Wang and Wu 2018), as well as the qilai-middle, which is illustrated in (15). Since the present study is concerned with ingressive -qilai, I will adopt Xiong’s ‘opaque’ category as a cover term here for all non-aspectual uses of qilai other than lexical, directional and resultative ones.
| (15) | 行走起来，非常不方便，鞋子里渗进雪水，冻得两只脚又僵又痛。 | ||||||||
| Xingzou-qilai | feichang | bu | fangbian | xiezi-li | shen-jin | xue | shui | ||
| walk- | very | not | convenient | shoe-inside | seep-in | snow | water | ||
| dong | de | liang-zhi | jiao | you | jiang | you | tong. | ||
| freeze | two- | foot | also | stiff | also | ache | |||
| ‘It walks very unpleasantly, the snow water gets into your shoes and your feet get so cold that they become both stiff and painful.’ | |||||||||
There are thus three non-aspectual uses of -xiaqu (lexical, directional, resultative) and four non-aspectual uses of -qilai (lexical, directional, resultative, opaque) to be accounted for in the corpus annotation. Next up is the aspectual semantics of both markers.
4.2. Ingressive -qilai
While -qilai synchronically retains its lexical meaning of ‘standing up’ as well as directly extended uses such as directionality, it is also widely analyzed as a viewpoint aspect marker encoding ingressivity (i.a., Chao 1968; Dai 1997; Xiao and McEnery 2004; Shyu et al. 2013; Xiong 2017; Wang and Wu 2018). As an ingressive marker, -qilai attaches to a main verb and contributes an aspectual viewpoint to the situation denoted by that verb. Xiao and McEnery define its aspectual contribution as “a situation has started and will continue for some time” (Xiao and McEnery 2004, p. 219), which aligns with the general definition given earlier in terms of phases of development: -qilai selects the beginning phase. In terms of situation aspect, ingressive -qilai is sensitive to durativity, being felicitous with all situation types except Achievements.
As for its syntax, -qilai may be split if it attaches to a verb that consists of two syllables or licenses some sort of object. Several elements may come between qi and lai. For example, in (16), -qilai attaches to the bisyllabic verb 跳舞 tiaowu ‘dance’, producing the structure 跳起舞来 tiao-qi wu-lai. In (17), -qilai is selected by the verb–object constituent 开玩笑 kai wanxiao ‘crack jokes’, in which case qi comes in between the verb and its object: 开起玩笑来 kai-qi wanxiao-lai. These split patterns have to be accounted for in the corpus.
| (16) | 几个年轻人跟着彼头的“黑鸟”歌跳起舞来了。 | ||||||
| Ji-ge | nianqingren | genzhe | Bitou | de | “Heiniao” | ge | |
| Several- | young.people | follow | Beatles | Blackbird | song | ||
| tiao-qi | wu-lai-le | ||||||
| jump- | dance- | ||||||
| (17) | 她竟给男人开起玩笑来， | |||||
| Ta | jing | gei | nanren | kai-qi | wanxiao-lai, | |
| she | unexpectedly | give | man | open- | joke- | |
Finally, there is some discussion in the literature on whether the ingressive viewpoint manifested by -qilai is a subtype of perfective or imperfective aspect. Xiao and McEnery (2004) consider it an imperfective viewpoint because it leaves a situation’s terminal boundary unfocused. Smith (1997) argues that it is neither, and introduces an additional category at the level of (im)perfectivity—‘neutral viewpoint aspect’—to account for their relationship. A third way out is to extend one’s definition of (im)perfectivity to include not just totality but also transition sensitivity (Koss et al. 2022), which results in 2 × 2 = 4 categories (in which case ingressivity would be non-total but transition-sensitive). For a heuristic study like the present one, however, the question whether -qilai’s ingressivity abstracts to perfectivity or imperfectivity is not relevant. We are interested in the specific means of expression translators come up with for this conceptual content, not its theoretical status in relation to similar concepts.
For -qilai, we now have input for both the operationalization (initial boundary and subsequent phase) and the corpus annotation (split structures). The aspectual use of -xiaqu is up next.
4.3. Continuative -xiaqu
-Xiaqu runs parallel to -qilai in its development as an aspect marker with its lexical source still intact. Besides its lexical meaning of ‘going down’ and immediate directional and resultative extensions, it has also been analyzed as a “successive” or “continuative” aspect marker (Chao 1968; Yang 1995; Dai 1997; Kang 1999; Xiao and McEnery 2004). In terms of situation type, -xiaqu is sensitive to the same parameter as -qilai, namely, durativity (Xiao and McEnery 2004:228). It is thus likewise incompatible with Achievements.
-xiaqu is both more complex and less complex than -qilai. Syntactically, it is less complex, as it cannot be split.12 Semantically, however, -xiaqu’s “continuativity” covers two types of viewpoint aspect. The general characterization given by Xiao and McEnery for the viewpoint encoded by -xiaqu is twofold: it “presupposes the prior initiation of a situation” and “focuses on the resumptive point and its continuative stage” (Xiao and McEnery 2004, p. 227). The conceptual complexity is manifested in the space between the prior initiation and resumptive point: these may be contiguous, as in (18), where the ‘staring’ is followed directly by ‘keeping on staring’. Crucially, though, -xiaqu also allows the prior initiation and resumptive point to be separated by a period in which the ‘continued’ situation does not hold. In this case, -xiaqu construes a special type of ingressive point: one preceded by prior initiation. This is illustrated by (19), a request to resume talking, which implies both that the other party talked before and that they stopped talking.
| (18) | 姜子牙再那么盯下去我就变成尼姑了。 | |||||||||
| Jiang | Ziya | zai | name | ding-xiaqu | wo | jiu | biancheng | nigu | le. | |
| Jiang | Ziya | again | like.that | gaze- | I | just | become | nun | ||
| ‘Jiang Ziya, if you keep on staring at me like that, I will turn into a nun.’ | ||||||||||
| (19) | “你说下去吧！妈，不要停。” | |||||
| “Ni | shuo-xiaqu-ba! | Ma, | bu | yao | ting.” | |
| you | speak- | mother | not | will | stop | |
| ‘Resume talking, mother, don’t stop.’ | ||||||
Xiao and McEnery term cases like (18) and (19) “uninterrupted” and “interrupted” continuativity, respectively (Xiao and McEnery 2004, p. 233). Indeed, the (lack of) interruption produces the two kinds of continuative points in (18) and (19): due to interruption, -xiaqu in (19) construes a special kind of ingressive point, whereas there is no interruption and hence no ingression in (18); the situation is already ongoing. Instead, cases like (18) are more closely related to ‘stopping’ than ‘starting’—that is, they boil down to the negation of ‘stopping’ (Jackendoff 1990, p. 44; Lieber and Baayen 1997, p. 804). This is reflected by the fact that the semantic contribution of -xiaqu in cases like (18) can be paraphrased as ‘not stop’ (‘if you don’t stop staring at me like that…’). Moreover, when non-interrupted continuative -xiaqu is negated, it gets the meaning ‘stop’, i.e., ‘not not stop’, cf. (20). Conversely, if a sentence like (19) is negated, it would mean “not resume” (the same goes for -qilai, which would mean “not begin”).
| (20) | 小纲，别说下去了！ | ||
| Xiaogang, | bie | shuo-xiaqu-le! | |
| Xiaogang | not | speak- | |
This means that Xiao and McEnery’s (un)interrupted distinction should play a central role in the present corpus study. To highlight the distinction, I will use two more distinct labels, reserving “continuative” for cases like (18) and (20), where the situation is ongoing and was not terminated; and using “resumptive” for cases like (19), where the situation was terminated and -xiaqu profiles a special type of initial (i.e., resumptive) point. A related point for annotation is that negated instances of continuative -xiaqu (cf. (20)) should not be part of the heuristic, as they do not translate to a negated version of a continuative marker, but to a notion that is not itself continuative (i.e., ‘stopping’).
We now have all the input we need for -xiaqu in order to operationalize (prior initiation and either not stopping or starting again after stopping) and annotate (no split structures and exclusion of negated instances of the continuative marker).
4.4. Operationalization
As the previous two sections made clear, the aspect markers -qilai and -xiaqu both deal with boundaries and phases in time, albeit different kinds of temporal points in varying constellations. In these terms, they interact with the situations (lexicalized by verbs or adjectives) that they project their aspectual viewpoint onto. By that I mean: situations are likewise made up of temporal phases (e.g., ‘eating a sandwich’) and boundaries (e.g., the first and last bites of that sandwich), and what aspectual viewpoint does is to impose or focus those boundaries and/or phases. This view corresponds to what are called “(Radical) Selection Theories of Aspect” (i.a., Breu 1994; Bickel 1997; Sasse 2002, pp. 222–25; Croft 2012, pp. 49–52; Koss et al. 2022; Bogaards forthcoming), which assume aspectual bidimensionality (i.e., situation and viewpoint) and claim that viewpoint markers (e.g., ingressive and continuative) map phasal structure already (partly) present in the aspectual structure of situations. They thus have selectional preferences.13 The aspectual building blocks shared by both situation and viewpoint aspect are temporal boundaries (notated as τ) and middle phases (notated as ϕ) (Bickel 1997). Boundaries τ are punctual and involve change (e.g., telicity); phases ϕ are durative and may be either dynamic or stative.
My claim is that these building blocks can be used to construct templates that make the viewpoint-aspectual value of the heuristic elements explicit and, at a more practical level, lay out a way to annotate the corpus data consistently and transparently.
So, what do ingressive -qilai and continuative/resumptive -xiaqu look like in terms of these building blocks? Although Xiao and McEnery (2004) do not explicitly subscribe to the type of aspectual theory discussed above, they do work with temporal boundaries to visualize -qilai’s and -xiaqu’s aspectual values. I will therefore base my templates on their work (cf. Xiao and McEnery 2004, pp. 223–33), but attach more weight to (i) the phases construed by boundaries, (ii) the dissimilarities between -xiaqu’s continuative and resumptive meanings and (iii) the similarities between resumptivity and ingressivity.
Starting with -qilai, the ingressive viewpoint encoded by this marker is quite simple, consisting of just one initial boundary τ and one middle phase ϕ in which the situation denoted by the main verb holds. This is visualized in Figure 1 across a temporal axis t; the ‘initial’ status of τ is captured by including an additional phase preceding it during which the same situation does not hold (¬ϕ). Put more generally, initial boundaries τ are those in between two phases ¬ϕ and ϕ. The braces map these phases onto the temporal axis, and their (half-)dottedness is meant to indicate that they are not (fully) in focus; the emphasis lies on the initial point.
Schematizing continuative -xiaqu using the same building blocks and conventions, the viewpoint in Figure 2 is somewhat more complex; in addition to the focused boundary τ2 there is an unfocused preceding boundary τ1, which is initial (between ¬ϕ and ϕ), contrary to τ2 (between ϕ1 and ϕ2). Normally, a boundary following a phase would itself constitute a terminal boundary (in between ϕ and ¬ϕ), but here the second phase is not negated. The analysis in Section 4.3 would account for this by claiming that ϕ2 in Figure 2 corresponds to ¬(¬ϕ).
Resumptive -xiaqu is the most complex (see Figure 3), featuring three boundaries and four phases: two where the situation holds, two where it does not. The focused boundary τ3 is sandwiched between ¬ϕ and ϕ, making it initial. However, there is an additional unfocused complete phase preceding τ3 defined by an initial boundary τ1 and a terminal boundary τ2. In this sense, resumptivity constitutes a focused initial boundary embedded in a more complex viewpoint. I would thus argue that in its focused region, resumptivity is in fact more similar to ingressivity than to continuativity.14
How do the templates in Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3 help the annotator? In two ways: first, the annotator can test whether the viewpoint is present in the translation by checking whether the situation in question also holds without a given marker. If so, they are dealing with continuativity; if not, with either ingressivity or resumptivity. Second, they can draw on the varying complexity of the viewpoints to motivate their annotation. The ingressive viewpoint construes only one temporal boundary, the continuative viewpoint two, the resumptive viewpoint three. Only if these complex aspectual structures are encoded by a given means of expression, can the translation be said to be marked for that type of viewpoint aspect. Taken together, working with these templates gives the annotator explicit and transparent schemas to fall back on when determining whether a specific type of viewpoint aspect is explicitly marked in a translation item in the corpus.
5. Corpus Assembly and Annotation
This study is part of a larger project aiming to develop and apply HTM in the domain of viewpoint aspect, with special attention for Mandarin and Dutch as aspect-oriented and non-aspect-oriented languages. The parallel corpus that the present study is based on is being assembled as part of this project. Corpus assembly is currently in an intermediate stage: five full novels and their translations have been digitized (via scanning and OCR) and aligned sentence-by-sentence, out of a planned twelve novels total. This study is the first application of HTM to a corpus of this size. Table 2 lists the Mandarin novels and Dutch translations with their authors and translators.
In its current state, the parallel corpus comprises 29,668 aligned sentence pairs: 611,232 characters on the Mandarin side, 413,094 words on the Dutch one. The basis for determining sentence pairs was orthographic: the full stop (“。” in Mandarin orthography) was taken as a boundary to distinguish corpus items. But as became clear during the alignment process, sentence boundaries often shift in translation; shorter Mandarin sentences are sometimes sewn together by Dutch translators, and long-winded Mandarin sentences are generally broken up into two or more separate clauses in Dutch. To ensure the quality of alignment, all sentence pairs in the corpus were therefore aligned manually.
With the parallel corpus for this study in place, the next step was to extract all instances of 起来 -qilai and 下去 -xiaqu. For -xiaqu this was simple enough, as it cannot be split. However, for split cases of -qilai a number of tokens had to be allowed between qi and lai. To extract as many instances as possible while also limiting noise, a maximum of three tokens was allowed. This yielded a total of 1074 items featuring qi[]{0,3}lai and 230 items featuring xiaqu. Noise—that is, items that did not correspond to either the non-aspectual or aspectual uses of xiaqu or qilai discussed in Section 4—was very rare: none for -xiaqu, only seven for -qilai. Sentence (21) is an example of noise: in this sentence, qi is part of the word 一起yiqi ‘together’, and lai is part of the verb 过来guolai ‘come over’.
| (21) | “我们是一起过来的。”男声回答。 | |||||||
| “Women | shi | yiqi | guolai | de.” | Nan | sheng | huida. | |
| we | be | together | come.over | man | voice | answer | ||
| ‘ “We came here together,” the male voice answered.’ | ||||||||
The first annotation round concerned coding all 1304 items for the usage types laid out in Section 4: lexical (qilai ‘stand up’, xiaqu ‘go down’), directional (‘up’ and ‘down’) and aspectual. For -qilai there was also the leftover category ‘opaque’ for items corresponding to none of these uses (e.g., middles). Finally, for -xiaqu the specific type of aspect had to be determined: continuative or resumptive. Sometimes this became clear from the immediate co-text (e.g., (18)–(20)), sometimes the wider co-text had to be consulted. Sentence (22a) is an example of a co-textually determined ‘continuative’ annotation: the direct co-text was not entirely conclusive, so the sentence directly before it—(22b)—had to be checked in order to pin down the aspectual type. In this way, all items could be annotated with certainty.
| (22) | a. | 她仍然用中文不停地说下去。 | |||||||
| Ta | rengran | yong | Zhongwen | bu | ting | de | shuo-xiaqu. | ||
| she | still | use | Chinese | not | stop | speak- | |||
| ‘She continues/ | |||||||||
| b. | 他打了几次手势叫桃红住嘴。 | ||||||||
| Ta | da-le | ji-ci | shoushi | jiao | Tao | Hong | zhuzui. | ||
| he | hit- | several- | gesture | call | Tao | Hong | shut.up | ||
| ‘He gestures to Tao Hong to stop talking.’ | |||||||||
Table 3 and Table 4 show the annotation results from the first round for both markers. Everything except the ingressive, continuative and resumptive categories will be left out of consideration from this point on.
An additional concern for the annotation of continuative -xiaqu raised in Section 4 involves negation, which—because it results in the interpretation ‘stopping’—is not itself continuative. Within the continuative subtype, negation at the clause-level was therefore also annotated. There were 10 negated continuative items total, which were not included in the second round of annotation. The total number of tokens to be involved in the analysis is listed in Table 5.
Then came the second annotation round—the core business of HTM: determining the expression(s) that the aspectual content (viz., ingressive, continuative, resumptive) was translated with. Following from the basic assumptions laid out in Section 2, not all content is necessarily translated or marked. The difference between the two is the following. Untranslated items either leave out the part of the clause with the aspect marker in the translation or deviate so strongly from the original structure that the locus of viewpoint aspect cannot be pinpointed. Unmarked items follow the original structure but do not mark the viewpoint aspect explicitly.
Sentence (23) exemplifies an untranslated item, (24) an unmarked one. From here on out, the Dutch translation from the parallel corpus will be given under (a), and my own English translation of the Dutch translated corpus item under (b). In (23), the reporting clause containing -qilai was simply left out in the translation; in (24), the verb marked by -qilai (尖叫jianjiao ‘shriek’) was translated to riep uit ‘exclaimed’, without any marking.
| (23) | “是匈奴吧？”吴每笑了起来。 | ||||||
| “Shi | Xiongnu | ba?” | Wu | Min | xiao-le-qilai. | ||
| be | Huns | Wu | Min | laugh- | |||
| a. | ‘Ah, Hunnen dan.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘Ah, the Huns then.’ | ||||||
| (24) | 他看着就尖叫起来: […] | ||||
| Ta | zhe | jiu | jianjao-qilai: | ||
| he | look- | just | shriek- | ||
| a. | ‘Al lezende riep hij uit: […].’ | ||||
| b. | ‘While reading he exclaimed: […].’ | ||||
All remaining corpus items (i.e., neither untranslated nor unmarked) were marked for ingressivity, continuativity or resumptivity in some way. The labels for their aspect marking strategies were designed and assigned in two ways. First, if the marking was the same as one of the strategies mentioned in previous work (Section 3.1 and Section 3.2), a label was assigned immediately. If not, the second way to work cyclically: first a preliminary assessment was made and later on—if the same strategy showed up more frequently—a definitive label was assigned to all of the corpus items featuring that strategy. In this way, all 524 relevant corpus items were ‘mined’ heuristically for viewpoint-aspectual means of expression. The results of this exercise will be presented in the next section.
6. Results
This section reports on the results from the HTM annotation: 452 tokens of aspectual -qilai and 72 tokens of aspectual -xiaqu were coded for the locus of viewpoint aspect in the Dutch translations. For each marker, I will present a quantitative overview of the ‘discovered’ categories, and then go over each of the categories, providing a more qualitative analysis based on specific examples. The idea is that these characterizations serve as hypotheses of the type “X encodes ingressive/continuative/resumptive aspect”, which may then be tested in future research on non-parallel corpora with a view to establishing the precise (non-)aspectual semantics and restrictions on productivity. At the end of this section, I will compare (non-)marking frequency of these types of viewpoint aspect and offer a tentative explanation for marking differences in terms of selection theory.
6.1. Ingressive -qilai
Table 6 gives a quantitative overview of all translation strategies (including unmarked and untranslated items) for ingressive -qilai. The labels are presented at two levels of abstraction: supercategories, which constitute either the head of a syntagmatically variable construction (e.g., gaan ‘go’) or a categorial abstraction over individual translations (i.e., adverbial and other verbal strategies); and subcategories, which specify either the different types of complement selected by a head (e.g., [gaan PP] and [gaan VINF] under gaan) or the specific strategies corresponding to an abstracted category (e.g., nu ‘now’ and voor het eerst ‘for the first time’ under adverbial strategies). Adverbial strategies are cases where the ingressive value of -qilai is encoded by means of an extra AdvP, that is, one that was not present in the original; other verbal strategies are verbs that do not select a VP- or TP-complement.
What is immediately apparent from the overview in Table 6 is that ‘unmarked’ is the largest supercategory (38.1%), although all marked cases taken together do constitute the majority (60.6%). Untranslated cases are very infrequent (1.3%). Among marked cases, strategies from previous work (Section 3.1) are well represented: beginnen (32.3%), copular worden (9.1%) and verbs from the ingressive set (gaan, komen, krijgen, moeten, raken, maken, zetten: cumulatively 7.5%) together make up nearly half of all items (48.9%). Other specific verbs taking a complement are less frequent (barsten, schieten, laten: cumulatively 5%), and least frequent are adverbial and other verbal strategies (both 2%). Overall, it seems that the Dutch linguistics literature has a decent grip on ingressivity: all mentioned strategies occur in the corpus.
I will first discuss the marked categories in order of frequency: beginnen and worden (Section 6.1.1), the ingressive set (Section 6.1.2), specific verbs selecting a complement (Section 6.1.3), and other verbal and adverbial strategies (Section 6.1.4). Last up are unmarked cases (Section 6.1.5).
6.1.1. Known Strategies from Previous Work: Beginnen and Worden
The prototypical Dutch ingressive verb, beginnen ‘begin’, is the most frequent marking strategy. It occurs both with a clausal complement headed by te ‘to’ and without (see (25) and (26)).
| (25) | 杨教头唰地一下，打开摺扇，扇了起来。 | ||||||||
| Yang | jiaotou | shua | de | yixia, | dakai | zheshan, | shan-le-qilai. | ||
| Yang | master | rustle | once | open | fan | fan- | |||
| a. | ‘Meester Yang sloeg zijn waaier open en begon ermee te wapperen.’ | ||||||||
| b. | ‘Master Yang opened his fan and started fanning with it.’ | ||||||||
| (26) | 阁楼屋顶的声音又响起来了。 | ||||||
| Gelou | wuding | de | shengyin | you | xiang-qilai-le. | ||
| attic | roof | sound | again | make.sound- | |||
| a. | ‘De geluiden op zolder beginnen weer.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘The sounds in the attic start again.’ | ||||||
Copular worden ‘become’ is also present, with both adjectival and nominal complements (see (27) and (28)). As a copula, worden attributes the property denoted by the adjective or noun to its subject (in (27) and (28): boos ‘angry’ and een cultuurland ‘a cultured country’); specifically, it signals the start of that attribution.
| (27) | 我气起来就打了他一记耳光， | |||||||
| Wo | qi-qilai | jiu | da-le | ta | yi-ji | erguang, | ||
| I | angry- | just | hit- | him | a- | slap.on.the.face | ||
| a. | ‘Ik werd kwaad en gaf hem een draai om zijn oren...’ | |||||||
| b. | ‘I got upset and gave him a whack around the ears…’ | |||||||
| (28) | 幸亏文化故国至少在一百年内还不会很快地文化起来， | ||||||||||
| Xinkui | wenhua | guguo | zhishao | zai | yibai-nian-nei | ||||||
| fortunately | culture | ancient country | at least | at | one.hundred-years-within | ||||||
| hai | bu | hui | hen | kuai | de | wenhua-qilai, | |||||
| still | not | will | very | quick | culture- | ||||||
| a. | ‘Gelukkig zou dit land met zijn oude cultuur tenminste de eerstkomende honderd jaar niet gauw weer een cultuurland worden.’ | ||||||||||
| b. | ‘Fortunately, this country with its ancient culture wouldn’t become a cultured country for at least the next one hundred years.’ | ||||||||||
These findings underscore previous work on ingressivity in Dutch, but do not add anything new. The next section will offer findings that are (partially) novel.
6.1.2. Verbs from the Ingressive Set: Gaan, Komen, Krijgen, Moeten, Raken, Maken, Zetten
Seven out of the fourteen verbs in the Dutch ingressive verb set (Section 3.1) are represented in the corpus. Crucial about previous work on the ingressive verb set is that these verbs are said to be in a syntagm with a situational PP headed by the preposition aan (i.a., Van Pottelberge 2004; Bogaards et al. forthcoming; Bogaards under review). However, these verbs also take other types of complements in the corpus: PPs headed by other prepositions, verbs, nouns and adjectives. Table 7 gives an overview of the specific combinations, providing one or two examples for each one. I will not go into each individual combination here, but the upshot is that the verbs from the ingressive set license a wider set of complements than just aan-PPs. Some of these complements may in fact be more frequent than PPs headed by aan, given that they are attested here contrary to many combinations with aan. As for the verbs themselves, it is striking that only one causative and one modal were found in the corpus (moeten and maken).15
Finally, zetten also occurs in the corpus, but prefixed with in- or op- (i.e., inzetten ‘set in’ and opzetten ‘put on’). These have ingressive meaning by themselves. One of them is illustrated in (29).
| (29) | 他的声音也变得幼稚温柔起来。 | |||||||
| Ta | de | shengyin | ye | biande | youzhi | wenrou-qilai. | ||
| he | voice | also | change | childish | tender- | |||
| a. | ‘Hij zette er ook een lief kinderstemmetje bij op.’ | |||||||
| b. | ‘He also put on a sweet childish voice.’ | |||||||
In sum, the parallel corpus reveals that the ‘ingressive verb set’ in Dutch is more heterogeneous than previously thought.
6.1.3. Other Verbs Selecting a Complement: Barsten, Schieten
The corpus also features three complement-selecting verbs not in the ingressive verb set: barsten ‘burst’, schieten ‘shoot’ and laten ‘let’. The first two of these combine with PPs denoting laughter, crying or related actions, such as in de lach ‘lit. in the laugh’, in huilen ‘lit. in crying’, and in gillen ‘lit. in shouting’. Barsten is prefixed with uit- ‘out’ in these cases (i.e., uitbarsten ‘burst out’). The punctual semantics of ‘bursting’ and ‘shooting’ appears to map to the initial boundary of these situations. This might be facilitated by the fact that the initiation of laughter and crying is usually accompanied by some vehemence. This is likewise lexicalized in English by ‘bursting into laughter/tears’. Corpus items (30) and (31) illustrate schieten and uitbarsten.
| (30) | 他们两个互相看看后又嘻嘻笑起来。 | |||||||
| Tamen | liang-ge | huxiang | kankan-hou | you | xixi | xiao-qilai. | ||
| they | two- | each.other | look-after | again | happy | laugh- | ||
| a. | ‘De twee keken elkaar aan en schoten opnieuw in de lach.’ | |||||||
| b. | ‘The two of them looked at each other and burst into laughter again.’ | |||||||
| (31) | 听到这里，司马南江忍不住大笑起来。 | ||||||
| Tingdao | zheli, | Sima | Nanjiang | renbuzhu | daxiao-qilai. | ||
| hear | here | Sima | Nanjiang | cannot.help | big.laugh- | ||
| a. | ‘Toen Sima Nanjiang dat hoorde, kon hij zich niet inhouden en barstte in hard lachen uit.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘When Sima Nanjiang heard that, he couldn’t help himself and burst out in loud laughter.’ | ||||||
Barsten and schieten appear to impose selectional restrictions with regard to their PP-complement (e.g., one can in lachen uitbarsten ‘burst out in laughter’ but not in eten uitbarsten ‘burst out in eating’).
6.1.4. Adverbial and Other Verbal Strategies
Certain adverbs and verbs in the corpus appear to lexicalize focus on a situation’s initial boundary. Examples of such adverbs are nu ‘now’ and voor het eerst ‘for the first time’. A different adverbial strategy is to relegate the Mandarin main verb marked by -qilai to the status of adverbial modifier—for instance, as a past participle—and attribute a property to the former verb’s subject that way. An ingressive interpretation is still possible in these cases, though, as (32) illustrates: by functioning as an adverb to the main verb liet zakken ‘lowered’, beschaamd ‘embarrassed’ allows for the interpretation that the state of ‘being embarrassed’ started at this point, rather than holding already.
| (32) | 吴敏不好意思起来，头一直俯着。 | ||||||
| Wu | Min | buhaoyisi-qilai, | tou | yizhi | fu-zhe. | ||
| Wu | Min | feel embarrassed- | head | straight | look.down- | ||
| a. | ‘Wu Min liet beschaamd zijn hoofd zakken.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘Wu min lowered his head in shame.’ | ||||||
Verbs or verbal expressions lexicalizing ingressivity in the corpus include de oren spitsen ‘prick up one’s ears’, ontvouwen ‘unfold’, plaatsmaken voor ‘make way for’ and een gesprek aanknopen ‘strike up a conversation’, which is illustrated in (33).
| (33) | 并且不经他人介绍就和司马南江交谈起来。 | ||||||||||
| Bingqie | bu | jing | taren | jieshao | jiu | he | Sima | Nanjiang | jiaotan-qilai. | ||
| and | not | through | another | introduce | just | with | Sima | Nanjiang | chat- | ||
| a. | ‘En zelfs zonder aan hem voorgesteld te zijn een gesprek met hem aanknoopten.’ | ||||||||||
| b. | ‘And even without having been introduced to him, struck up a conversation with him.’ | ||||||||||
Means of expression of this type, where ingressivity is subtly lexicalized, are the most difficult to identify using introspection because they are not very frequent. Indeed, all of them are hapaxes in the parallel corpus. This is where HTM is of clear added value. With a larger parallel corpus, there would likely be more lexicalized expressions ‘discovered’.
6.1.5. Unmarked Cases
The largest category of translations for ingressive -qilai is unmarked. Sentences (34)–(36) are examples of these unmarked corpus items.
| (34) | 屋顶的声音又响起来了。 | |||||
| Wuding | de | shengyin | you | xiang-qilai-le. | ||
| roof | sound | again | make.sound- | |||
| a. | ‘Het geluid op het dak is weer terug.’ | |||||
| b. | ‘The sound on the roof is back again.’ | |||||
| (35) | 郭老摇头笑了起来。 | ||||
| Guo | lao | yaotou | xiao-le-qilai. | ||
| Guo | old | shake head | laugh- | ||
| a. | ‘Hij lachte hoofdschuddend.’ | ||||
| b. | ‘He laughed, shaking his head.’ | ||||
| (36) | 他突然沉默起来， | |||
| Ta | turan | chenmo-qilai. | ||
| he | suddenly | silent- | ||
| a. | ‘Opeens zweeg hij.’ | |||
| b. | ‘Suddenly he became silent.’ | |||
In (34), the locus of ingressivity is the stative predicate is terug ‘is back’, in (35) the durative and atelic predicate lachte ‘laughed’, and in (36), the punctual and telic predicate zweeg ‘became silent’. Their unmarked ingressive interpretations in Dutch appear to be licensed given the right context, and provided that it is clear what the initial boundary should roughly look like. However, with the exception of (36), which independently features an adverb suggesting ingressivity (i.e., 突然 turan ‘suddenly’), these items could also receive non-ingressive readings where ‘being back’ and ‘laughing’ are simply ongoing. It thus seems that, at least in the parallel corpus, Dutch is more often underspecified for ingressivity than Mandarin.
6.2. Continuative/Resumptive -xiaqu
The two types of viewpoint aspect encoded by -xiaqu—continuative and resumptive—were treated separately for the purposes of annotation (cf. Section 4 and Section 5). Table 8 lists the translation strategies for its continuative sense, according to the same format as -qilai: abstracted supercategories subdividing into subcategories. Contrary to the ingressive overview, the most frequent strategies are in fact not known from previous work (Section 3.2): the verbal prefixes door- ‘through’ and verder- ‘further’, which make up more than half of all items (54.3%), are thus an aspectual ‘discovery’ in this sense. The verbs from the continuative verb set (blijven and houden: cumulatively, 23.9%) are represented, but not with the types of PP-complement discussed in the literature. There are a few adverbial strategies (10.9%), and just one unmarked case (2.2%). Another prefix not known from the literature—voort- ‘forward’—also occurs, but only once (2.2%). Conspicuously absent from the corpus with previous work in mind is the en maar-construction (cf. Section 3.2); this is likely because it is a colloquial construction not or rarely found in the literary genre (although it could have popped up in embedded dialogue).
For resumptive -xiaqu, the quantitative picture in Table 9 is largely but not entirely different. The prefixes verder- and door- are both represented, but in a rather different distribution: verder- (65.4%) is almost three times as frequent (65.4/23.9 = 2.7), and there is only one instance of resumptive door- (3.8%). A chi-squared test (with Yates correction for small sample sizes) shows that the difference in the distribution of continuative and resumptive interpretations over door- and verder- is significant (χ2 = 9.61, df = 1, p = 0.002).16 I will return to this finding in Section 6.2.5. Voort- ‘further’ occurs once here too, and there is one instance of a verbal strategy: vervolgen ‘proceed’ (both 3.8%). A notable strategy for resumptivity is the use of an ingressive verb (gaan, beginnen) combined with the adverb weer ‘again’ (19.2%). This aligns with the idea voiced in Section 4.4 that resumptivity basically constitutes a special type of ingressivity embedded in a more complex viewpoint. A final observation is that there are zero cases of untranslated or unmarked resumptivity.
In what follows, the markers from Table 8 and Table 9 will be discussed in order of frequency: prefixes (Section 6.2.1), verbs from the continuative set (Section 6.2.2) and adverbial and other verbal strategies (Section 6.2.3). The section concludes with a discussion of the most frequent markers from Table 8 and Table 9 in terms of their overlap and specialization with regard to continuativity and resumptivity.
6.2.1. Prefixes: Verder-, Door-, Voort-
The most striking ‘discovery’ of the present HTM exercise is the prevalence of prefixes not mentioned in the literature on Dutch viewpoint aspect: verder- ‘further’, door- ‘through’ and voort- ‘forward’. Verder- and voort- occur in both continuative and resumptive interpretations. Sentence (37) exemplifies a continuative interpretation of verder-, (38) a resumptive one. Formally, verder- may either select a main verb (e.g., verder leven ‘keep living’ in (37)) or occur in the combination verdergaan met (e.g., verdergaan met praten ‘resume talking’ in (38)). Voort- seems to be more limited in what it attaches to, but the precise restrictions are not clear from the parallel corpus.
| (37) | 有一次我听到女的一边哭泣一边说，再也不愿意和他这个穷鬼过下去了， | |||||||||
| Youyici | wo | tingdao | nüde | yibian | kuqi | yibian | shuo, | zaiyebu | ||
| once | I | hear | woman | one.side | weep | one.side | speak | not.any.more | ||
| yuanyi | he | ta | zhe-ge | qiong | gui | guo-xiaqu-le. | ||||
| wish | with | him | this- | poor | ghost | live- | ||||
| a. | ‘Op een keer hoorde ik haar huilend zeggen dat ze niet meer verder wilde leven met een armoedzaaier zoals hij. | |||||||||
| b. | ‘One time I heard her cry and say that she didn’t want to keep on living with a bum like him.’ | |||||||||
| (38) | 我上了炕还得说下去。 | ||||||
| Wo | shang-le | kang | hai | dei | shuo-xiaqu. | ||
| I | upon- | kang | still | must | speak- | ||
| a. | ‘Als ik op de kang lig wil ik verdergaan met praten.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘When I lay down on the kang I want to resume talking.’ | ||||||
Formally, the prefix door- mirrors verder-, occurring attached to a main verb or in the combination doorgaan met. Door- has a clear preference for continuativity, with only one attestation being resumptive. Both interpretations are illustrated below: (39) continuative, (40) resumptive.17
| (39) | 他们再那样子谈下去，我就要下车了。 | |||||||||
| Tamen | zai | na | yangzi | tan-xiaqu, | wo | jiu | yao | xiache-le. | ||
| they | again | that | way | chat- | I | just | want | get off- | ||
| a. | ‘Als zij in deze trant doorpraten, wil ik eruit.’ | |||||||||
| b. | ‘If they keep on talking in this way, I want to get off.’ | |||||||||
| (40) | 她继续唱下去。 | |||
| Ta | jixu | chang-xiaqu. | ||
| she | proceed | sing- | ||
| a. | ‘Ze gaat door met zingen.’ | |||
| b. | ‘She resumes singing.’ | |||
Further research into these prefixes is desirable, since they have received little treatment in previous work—much in favor of the verb blijven, which is up next.
6.2.2. Verbs from the Continuative Set: Blijven, Houden
In previous work (Section 3.2), blijven ‘stay’ was associated with continuativity, and in various syntagms: with an infinitive, a PP headed by aan ‘on’, and as a copula with a nominal or adjectival complement. It is, however, only attested in the corpus with an infinitive, and it is overall less frequent than two of the prefixes discussed before (door- and verder-). More strikingly, blijven is restricted to continuative (i.e., non-resumptive) interpretations, which is not made explicit in previous work. All of this suggests that blijven occupies a more central position in the Dutch viewpoint aspect literature than is empirically justified.
Blijven’s causative counterpart houden ‘keep’ is likewise restricted to non-resumptive continuativity. Houden is attested once, also not with the type of complement mentioned in the literature (aan-PP), but with a prefix that allows it to be used non-causatively (i.e., uithouden ‘endure’). This attestation is shown in (41).
| (41) | “我们撑船人可以这样子活下去，你们舱客就不能吗？” | |||||||
| “Women | chengchuan | ren | keyi | zheyangzi | huo-xiaqu, | nimen | ||
| we | punt.boat | people | can | like.this | live- | you. | ||
| cang | ke | jiu | bu | neng | ma?” | |||
| cabin | customer | just | not | can | ||||
| a. | ‘Als wij vaargasten het zo kunnen uithouden, kunnen jullie passagiers dat toch ook?’ | |||||||
| b. | ‘If us sailors can endure it like this, you passengers should be able to as well, right?’ | |||||||
6.2.3. Adverbial and Other Verbal Strategies
Continuative and resumptive viewpoint aspect are realized in the translations by distinct adverbial and/or other verbal strategies. For continuativity, there are four adverbs in the corpus, all of which boil down to ‘not stopping during the situation’: aan een stuk door ‘continously’, steeds ‘continually’, in één adem ‘in one breath’, and nog langer ‘even longer’, which is illustrated in (42).
| (42) | 再盯下去我就变成姨太太了。 | ||||||
| Zai | ding-xiaqu | wo | jiu | biancheng | yitaitai-le. | ||
| again | stare- | I | just | change | concubine- | ||
| a. | ‘Als je me nog langer aanstaart zal ik in de concubine veranderen.’ | ||||||
| b. | ‘If you stare at me me any longer I’ll transform into the concubine.’ | ||||||
For resumptivity there is one case of this type of strategy, but a notable one: the use of an ingressive verb (beginnen or gaan—cf. Section 6.1.1) with an adverb indicating the return of a former situation (i.e., weer ‘again’). This speaks for the analysis of resumptivity as a special type of ingressivity with additional complexity; precisely this complexity (i.e., the situation held previously) is contributed by weer. Corpus item (43) illustrates this.
| (43) | 她将钱收到裙子口袋里，推起她的车子，顶着风，吃力地行走下去， | |||||||||
| Ta | jiang | qian | shoudao | qunzi | koudai-li, | tui | qi | ta | ||
| she | take | money | receive | skirt | pocket-in | push | rise | she | ||
| de | Chezi, | ding-zhe | Feng, | chili | de | xingzou-xiaqu. | ||||
| sub | cart | go.against- | wind | strain | walk- | |||||
| a. | ‘Ze stak het geld weg in haar rok en begon weer moeizaam haar kar tegen de wind in te duwen.’ | |||||||||
| b. | ‘She put the money away in her skirt and started to push her cart again, with difficulty, against the wind.’ | |||||||||
6.2.4. Unmarked Case
There is one unmarked continuative case in the corpus, and zero unmarked resumptive ones. How can continuativity go unmarked? Given the conceptual structure of continuativity schematized in Section 4.4, there are at least two co(n)textual prerequisites: (i) the situation may not have been interrupted and (ii) the continuative (i.e., ‘not stopping’) boundary must somehow be salient, otherwise it would be necessary to mark it. The one unmarked case, shown in (44), indeed meets these criteria: the situation—i.e., 活huo ‘live’—clearly cannot be interrupted, and the sentences preceding it specify that anaphoric er ‘it’ refers to afflictions of old age.18 Hence, a kind of abstract ‘not stopping’ boundary can be understood from the transition from not suffering to suffering from these afflictions.
| (44) | 要不他们怎么活下去。 | ||||
| Yaobu | tamen | zenme | huo-xiaqu. | ||
| otherwise | they | how | live- | ||
| a. | ‘Hoe viel er anders mee te leven?’ | ||||
| b. | ‘How else would they be able to live with it?’ | ||||
Generally, though, continuativity is basically always marked in the Dutch translations—contrary to ingressivity. Section 6.3 will speculate on why this might be.
6.2.5. Specialization and Overlap in Continuativity and Resumptivity
Aspectual -xiaqu covers both continuativity and resumptivity. The most frequent Dutch translation strategies (verder-, door-, blijven) differ in this respect. To get a better grip on this variation, Table 10 shows the frequency of the Dutch strategie encoding continuativity or resumptivity.
Table 10 makes it clear that Dutch verder- covers both types, although it prefers resumptivity. As shown at the start of Section 6.2, this association is statistically significant. The other two markers, on the other hand, have a clear preference for continuativity: door- gets a resumptive interpretation only once, as opposed to 14 continuative interpretations; blijven is restricted to continuativity.
So contrary to Mandarin -qilai and the Dutch ingressive strategies, which differed chiefly in (non-)marking (the Dutch sentences often being underspecified for ingressivity), the Mandarin and Dutch continuative strategies vary in a different way: where -xiaqu takes care of both continuativity and resumptivity, Dutch has a specialized marker for continuativity and two markers with a strong preference for just one of the two (door- for continuativity, verder- for resumptivity).
6.3. Marking Frequency and Aspectual Complexity
HTM with at least two heuristic elements makes it possible to compare marking frequency. As the previous sections showed, there are considerable differences in the distribution of (un)marked translations over the viewpoint aspect markers: -qilai was marked less frequently than -xiaqu, and there was also a slight difference between -xiaqu’s continuative and resumptive readings. This comparison can be enhanced with marking frequencies from previous HTM research. Bogaards (2019a) applied HTM using the Mandarin “imperfective” verbal marker 着-zhe, using a similar novel/translation-based corpus and equivalent criteria for ‘unmarkedness’ and ‘untranslatedness’. Table 11 shows marking frequency for not only the markers used in the present study, but also imperfective -zhe, taken from Bogaards (2019a, p. 174).
Now there is a threefold difference: in the Dutch translations, -zhe’s imperfectivity goes unmarked most of the time (73.6%), -qilai’s ingressivity is marked in the majority of items (61.4%) while -xiaqu’s continuativity is marked basically always (97.7%) and its resumptivity in all cases. Three separate chi-squared tests (with Yates correction) show that (i) the difference in marking between continuative and resumptive translations is not significant (χ2 = 0.07, df = 1, p = 0.798), (ii) the difference between continuative/resumptive and ingressive and ingressive translations is significant (χ2 = 35.26, df = 1, p < 0.001), (iii) as is the difference between ingressive and imperfective translations (χ2 = 115.7, df = 1, p < 0.001). Thus, the marking hierarchy is imperfective > ingressive > continuative/resumptive. How can these differences in marking be accounted for? A straightforward explanation would be that Dutch grammaticalizes these notions to different degrees. But there may be a more general force at play here. I will put forward a tentative explanation for the marking differences in Table 11.
As was claimed in Section 4.4, the ingressive, continuative and resumptive viewpoints vary in aspectual complexity. That is, the basic building blocks (boundaries τ and phases ϕ) required to model each viewpoint differ in both number and organization. As the conceptual structures in Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3 make clear, ingressivity is made up out of three building blocks (¬ϕ, τ, ϕ), continuativity out of five (¬ϕ, τ1, ϕ1, τ2, ϕ2) and resumptivity out of seven (¬ϕ, τ1, ϕ1, τ2, ¬ϕ, τ3, ϕ2). The imperfective viewpoint, on the other hand, is simpler; its representation in these terms is ‘ϕ’ along a temporal axis t. In this sense, the number of building blocks required for each viewpoint mirrors the degree to which they are marked in the translations: more complexity means more marking. I would therefore like to suggest that, in the domain of viewpoint aspect, complexity correlates with obligatory marking. Clearly, this claim requires more empirical evidence to be at all convincing; I am positing it here merely as a general hypothesis. HTM offers a way of testing this type of claim, as working with translations in this manner facilitates quantifying (non-)marking of conceptual content.
7. Conclusions
This study conducted a heuristic translation mining (HTM) analysis in the viewpoint-aspectual domain—specifically: ingressive, continuative and resumptive aspect—in Mandarin Chinese and Dutch. The aims were threefold: (i) methodological, to expand HTM by working with several and more specific heuristic elements; (ii) descriptive, to heuristically map out ingressivity, continuativity and resumptivity in a non-aspect-oriented language like Dutch; and (iii) theoretical, to contribute to general research into crosslinguistic variation in encoding specific conceptual (aspectual) content.
Methodologically, the study drew on selection theories of aspect (e.g., Bickel 1997) to construct viewpoint-aspectual templates in terms of phases ϕ and boundaries τ, which were used to annotate the corpus data consistently and analyze them in a transparent way. A second finding having to do with method is that aspect markers at this level of specificity are in fact quite rare. In its current state of 29,668 parallel pairs and 611,232 characters, the corpus yielded 452 ingressive tokens, 56 continuative tokens and only 26 resumptive ones. The larger parallel corpus that is being assembled for the research project that this study is a part of is therefore by no means an unnecessary luxury. Third and last, the use of several distinct markers made it possible to compare marking frequency, which is not possible without some kind of quantifiable comparative method such as HTM.
Descriptively, the HTM analysis showed that the literature on Dutch viewpoint aspect has quite a solid grip on ingressivity, but not so much on continuativity (and not at all on resumptivity). Newly ‘discovered’ means of expression for ingressivity are:
Other complements for the verbs from the ingressive set: various prepositional, nominal and adjectival complements;
Other verbs taking a complement: barsten ‘burst’ and schieten ‘shoot’ selecting a PP with specific restrictions (e.g., in lachen or in de lach ‘in laughter’);
Adverbial and other verbal strategies;
Unmarked verbs.
For continuativity, the focus in previous work was on the verb blijven ‘stay’ and its causative counterpart houden ‘hold’. Because of that, the more frequent markers (in the present corpus) door- and verder- were overlooked, and resumptivity largely ignored. The new findings for these types of aspect in Dutch are:
Prefixes door- ‘through’, verder- ‘further’ and voort- ‘forward’, with varying preferences for continuativity and resumptivity;
Adverbial strategies for continuativity;
Ingressive verb + ‘return to former situation’-adverb (e.g., weer ‘again’) for resumptivity.
These lists constitute testable hypotheses for the Dutch viewpoint-aspectual domain and as such provide direct input for further research in this field. That is to say, the hypotheses that these constructions encode ingressive/continuative/resumptive aspect may be specified by examining their (non-)aspectual semantics and restrictions on productivity. At a more general level, these lists also indicate where specific types of viewpoint aspect may be encoded in a non-aspect-oriented language: rather than in grammatical particles, they may be articulated by specific verbs, lexical and adverbial strategies, prefixes, and verb–adverb combinations. In the long run, this may also feed into linguistic theories on the crosslinguistic ordering of functional projections (e.g., cartographic approaches in the spirit of Cinque 1999); if one postulates that continuative viewpoint aspect occupies a fixed syntactic position crosslinguistically, for example, then Mandarin -xiaqu and Dutch door-, verder- and voort- present a specific case to support or challenge such an assumption. In this sense, these hypotheses are theoretically relevant for future research.
Theoretically, this study found a (non-)marking difference between Mandarin and Dutch regarding ingressivity (but not for continuativity/resumptivity). In the parallel corpus, Dutch left its verbs underspecified for ingressive aspect in 38.6% of cases. Of course, this finding is not very telling if the analysis is not reversed: the question is how frequently Mandarin translations of Dutch originals with, say, the marker beginnen are marked for ingressive aspect (and whether there are other ways of doing so than with -qilai). A more tangible finding is the difference in marking across viewpoint aspects within Dutch, especially in comparison to earlier (H)TM research into imperfectivity in Mandarin and Dutch: whereas imperfectivity was marked in only 26.4% of cases, ingressivity was marked 61.4% of the time and continuativity/resumptivity basically always. Based on this marking hierarchy, the tentative hypothesis was formulated that aspectual complexity (in terms of selection theory) correlates with obligatory marking. HTM provides the opportunity to test this type of hypothesis quantitatively and without needing to rely on intuitions.
New (aspectual) discoveries can be made by extending HTM; doing so requires assembling larger parallel corpora and being specific about the conceptual content under study. Ironing out these methodological issues makes HTM a useful empirical tool for investigating the expression of viewpoint aspect across languages.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
The original sentences featuring -qilai and -xiaqu and their translations from the parallel corpus, as well as the annotations, are available online at the following link:
I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the special issue editor for their challenging yet constructive criticism. I particularly appreciate Bert Le Bruyn’s efforts in synthesizing the reviews and actively thinking along with me. Thanks to Ronny Boogaart for valuable comments on earlier versions of this work. Needless to say, all remaining errors are my own.
The author declares no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.
Footnotes
1. Cf.
2. In the Chinese linguistics literature, “inchoative” and “inceptive” refer to the beginnings of States and Events, respectively, i.e., a distinction motivated by the interaction with situation type. “Ingressive” is then used as a cover term for both, which is why I use it here. Cf.
3. The analogy with linguistic surveys is not just metaphorical: a possible research method is to hire professional translators as actual ‘survey respondents’ to translate a specially selected set of items, as in
4. These labels will be discussed in more detail in
5. Non-narrative discourse corresponds largely to dialogue, except that narrative discourse may sometimes also show up in dialogue (
6. This approach will be fleshed out in
7. Dik and Hengeveld do not distinguish between two types of ‘continuing’: interrupted (“After stopping for a bit, John continued crying again”) and non-interrupted (“John continued crying for hours on end”). Their definition above only covers non-interrupted continuation.
8. Dik and Hengeveld use the term “continuous” for (5b), but this term is usually reserved for an intermediate aspectual distinction below imperfectivity and above (non-)progressivity (cf.
9.
(i). Nu de Raad van State geen bezwaar heeft, wil het Zeeuwse nutsbedrijf zo snel mogelijk aan het bouwen.
‘Now that the Council of State has no objection, the utility company from Zeeland wants to start building as soon as possible.’
10. As one reviewer points out, worden has a broader semantics in that it can also construe a pre-phase to a change-of-state. For example, in springtime one can say de bladeren worden groen ‘the leaves are turning green’, which denotes a runup process to a final state of being entirely green.
11. This paper uses the following abbreviations for glossing:
12. This seems to be related to aspectual -xiaqu being unable to license verbs with objects. To illustrate, (ii) and (iii)—which add the standard object 歌ge ‘song’ to the predicate 唱chang ‘sing’ in corpus item (i)—were both judged unacceptable by a native speaker informant.
| (i) | 她继续唱下去。 | ||
| Ta | jixu | chang-xiaqu. | |
| she | proceed | sing-xiaqu | |
| ‘She continues singing.’ | |||
| (ii) | *她继续唱歌下去。 | ||
| *Ta jixu changge-xiaqu. | |||
| (iii) | *她继续唱下歌去。 | ||
| *Ta jixu chang-xia ge-qu. | |||
13. This is not to say that viewpoint-aspectual markers only select the types of predicates they prefer. ‘Mismatches’ between the two dimensions may be exploited for aspectual coercion, resulting, for instance, in a shift in situation type (cf.
14. One reviewer raises the question how continuative and resumptive aspect are similar rather than different, given that these two viewpoints are mapped to the same marker in Mandarin. One possibility is that the focused phase ϕ2 in both cases corresponds to ¬(¬ϕ), albeit in different ways: for continuativity this would be the negation of a ‘stopping’ presupposition; for resumptivity it would be the negation of actual stopping (i.e., the intermediate ¬ϕ).
15. This raises the question (as noted by a reviewer) whether these types of verbs are less well-suited to encoding ingressivity. Alternatively, it might be a matter of frequency. In any case, this question could be addressed by means of a non-parallel corpus.
16. All statistical tests in this paper were performed at
17. The resumptivity of (40) was determined by looking at the preceding sentences, which translate to “I tell her to stop singing. […] She tells me that this is the first song I taught her.”
18. Translated to English, the three preceding sentences read: “People of that age usually respond rather slowly. If someone is so far gone that they don’t realize they’re annoying others, they’re all the more annoying. But maybe that was their good fortune? How else would they be able to live with it?”.
19. The total number of markers differs slightly from those in
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Enlarge this image.Figure 1. Schematic representation of ingressive aspect built out of boundaries τ and phases ϕ.
Enlarge this image.Figure 2. Schematic representation of continuative aspect built out of boundaries τ and phases ϕ.
Enlarge this image.Figure 3. Schematic representation of resumptive aspect built out of boundaries τ and phases ϕ.
Ingressive verbs licensed by the ‘aan het-construction’.
| Ingressive Verb | [± |
[± |
|---|---|---|
| gaan ‘go’, komen ‘come’, (ge)raken ‘get’, slaan ‘hit’, zich zetten ‘put oneself’ | − | − |
| krijgen ‘obtain’, maken ‘make’, zetten ‘put’, brengen ‘bring’ | + | − |
| kunnen ‘can’, moeten ‘must’, mogen ‘may’, willen ‘want’ | − | + |
Novels and translations in the parallel corpus.
| Original | Author | Translation | Translator(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 桑青与桃红 |
聂华 |
Twee Chinese vrouwen |
Anne Sytske Keijser |
| 孽子 Niezi |
白先勇 |
Jongens van glas |
Mark Leenhouts |
| 只有一个太阳 |
张洁 |
Er is maar één zon |
Koos Kuiper |
| 十爱 Shi ai |
张悦然 |
Tien liefdes |
Various, edited by |
| 第七天 Di qi tian |
余华 |
De zevende dag |
Jan De Meyer |
Types of -qilai in the corpus, absolute and relative frequencies.
| Type | n | % |
|---|---|---|
| Ingressive | 452 | 42.1% |
| Directional | 400 | 37.2% |
| Opaque | 115 | 10.7% |
| Resultative | 85 | 7.9% |
| Lexical | 15 | 1.4% |
| Noise | 7 | 0.7% |
| Total | 1074 | 100% |
Types of -xiaqu in the corpus, absolute and relative frequencies.
| Type | n | % |
|---|---|---|
| Directional | 104 | 45.2% |
| Continuative | 56 | 24.3% |
| Resultative | 40 | 17.4% |
| Resumptive | 26 | 11.3% |
| Lexical | 4 | 1.7% |
| Noise | 0 | 0% |
| Total | 230 | 100% |
Total number of tokens of aspectual -qilai and -xiaqu to be involved in HTM analysis.
| Aspect Marker | n |
|---|---|
| -qilai | 452 |
| -xiaqu | 72 |
| Total | 524 |
Strategies for translating ingressive -qilai to Dutch.
| Supercategories | Subcategories | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Translation | n | % | Translation | n | % |
|
|
172 | 38.1% |
|
172 | 38.1% |
| beginnen ‘begin’ | 146 | 32.3% | beginnen te VINF | 141 | 31.2% |
| beginnen | 5 | 1.1% | |||
| worden ‘become’ | 41 | 9.1% | worden A | 37 | 8.2% |
| worden N | 4 | 0.9% | |||
| barsten ‘burst’ | 20 | 4.4% | uit-barsten PP | 19 | 4.2% |
| los-barsten | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| gaan ‘go’ | 11 | 2.4% | gaan VINF | 7 | 1.6% |
| gaan PP | 4 | 0.9% | |||
| komen ‘come’ | 10 | 2.2% | komen PP | 4 | 0.9% |
| komen VINF | 2 | 0.4% | |||
| komen A | 2 | 0.4% | |||
| komen | 2 | 0.4% | |||
| krijgen ‘obtain’ | 10 | 2.2% | krijgen N | 7 | 1.6% |
| krijgen A | 2 | 0.4% | |||
| krijgen PP | 1 | 0.2% | |||
|
|
9 | 2% | adverbial past participle (e.g., beschaamd ‘embarrassed’) | 4 | 0.9% |
| other adverb (e.g., schor ‘hoarse’) | 2 | 0.4% | |||
| nu ‘now’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| voor het eerst ‘for the first time’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| nog nooit zo ‘never like that’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
|
|
9 | 2% | een gesprek aanknopen ‘strike up a conversation’ | 1 | 0.2% |
| de oren spitsen ‘prick up one’s ears’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| verdriet doen ‘give (sb.) pain’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| ontvouwen ‘unfold’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| oplaaien ‘flare up’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| overgaan tot ‘take to’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| plaatsmaken voor ‘make way for’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| volgen ‘follow’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| zich mengen in ‘join in’ | 1 | 0.2% | |||
|
|
6 | 1.3% |
|
6 | 1.3% |
| moeten ‘must’ | 5 | 1.1% | moeten VINF | 5 | 1.1% |
| raken ‘get’ | 5 | 1.1% | raken PP | 5 | 1.1% |
| maken ‘maken’ | 4 | 0.9% | maken A | 3 | 0.7% |
| maken PP | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| zetten ‘put’ | 2 | 0.4% | op-zetten | 1 | 0.2% |
| in-zetten | 1 | 0.2% | |||
| schieten ‘shoot’ | 2 | 0.4% | schieten PP | 2 | 0.4% |
| Total | 452 | 100% | total | 452 | 100% |
Types of complements selected by verbs from the ’ingressive set’.
| Verb | Type of Complement | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PP | VINF | N | A | |
| gaan |
aan het werk gaan |
gaan vechten |
- | - |
| komen |
op gang komen |
- | - | los komen |
| krijgen |
het aan zijn hart krijgen ‘start having problems with one’s heart’ | - | ruzie krijgen |
het druk krijgen ‘become busy’ |
| moeten |
- | moeten lachen ‘start laughing’ | - | - |
| raken |
aan de praat raken |
- | - | - |
| maken |
aan het hoesten maken ‘make (sb.) cough’ | - | lui maken‘ |
|
Strategies for translating continuative -xiaqu to Dutch.
| Supercategories | Subcategories | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Translation | n | % | Translation | n | % |
| door- ‘through’ | 14 | 30.4% | doorgaan (te/met VINF) | 9 | 19.6% |
| door-V | 5 | 10.9% | |||
| verder- ‘further’ | 11 | 23.9% | verder V | 10 | 21.7% |
| verdergaan met VINF | 1 | 2.2% | |||
| blijven ‘stay’ | 10 | 21.7% | blijven VINF | 8 | 17.4% |
| blijven door-VINF | 1 | 2.2% | |||
| aan-blijven | 1 | 2.2% | |||
|
|
5 | 10.9% | aan een stuk door ‘continuously’ | 2 | 4.3% |
| steeds ‘continually’ | 1 | 2.2% | |||
| nog langer ‘even longer’ | 1 | 2.2% | |||
| in één adem ‘in one breath’ | 1 | 2.2% | |||
|
|
3 | 6.5% |
|
3 | 6.5% |
|
|
1 | 2.2% |
|
1 | 2.2% |
| houden ‘keep’ | 1 | 2.2% | uit-houden | 1 | 2.2% |
| voort- ‘forward’ | 1 | 2.2% | voort-V | 1 | 2.2% |
| Total | 46 | 100% | Total | 46 | 100% |
Strategies for translating resumptive -xiaqu to Dutch.
| Supercategories | Subcategories | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Translation | n | % | Translation | n | % |
| verder- ‘further’ | 17 | 65.4% | verder V | 14 | 53.9% |
| verdergaan met VINF | 3 | 11.5% | |||
|
|
5 | 19.2% | weer gaan ‘go again’ | 3 | 11.5% |
| weer beginnen ‘begin again’ | 2 | 7.7% | |||
|
|
2 | 7.7% | vervolgen ‘proceed’ | 2 | 7.7% |
| door- ‘through’ | 1 | 3.8% | doorgaan met VINF | 1 | 3.8% |
| voort- ‘forward’ | 1 | 3.8% | voort-V | 1 | 3.8% |
| N | 26 | 100% | N | 26 | 100% |
Frequency of verder-, door- and blijven encoding continuative/resumptive aspect in the corpus.
| Marker | Continuative | Resumptive | Total | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| n | % | n | % | n | % | |
| verder- ‘further’ | 11 | 39.3% | 17 | 60.7% | 28 | 100% |
| door- ‘through’ | 14 | 93.3% | 1 | 6.7% | 15 | 100% |
| blijven ‘stay’ | 10 | 100% | 0 | 0% | 10 | 100% |
Distribution of marked/unmarked translations over translated aspect markers
| Type of Aspect | Marked | Unmarked | Total | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| n | % | n | % | n | % | |
| Ingressive | 274 | 61.4% | 172 | 38.6% | 446 | 100% |
| Continuative | 42 | 97.7% | 1 | 2.3% | 43 | 100% |
| Resumptive | 26 | 100% | 0 | 0% | 26 | 100% |
| Imperfective | 127 | 26.4% | 354 | 73.6% | 481 | 100% |
Supplementary Materials
The following supporting information can be downloaded at:
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