Abstract
This paper offers a quantitative study of temporal reference in Mandarin using three translation corpora (French–Mandarin, Mandarin–French and English–Mandarin). We have systematically examined a series of overt linguistic factors (such as perfective and imperfective grammaticalized particles, temporal adverbs and adverbials) and non-linguistic factors (such as lexical aspect and the Bounded Event Constraint, the latter argued to be a universal pragmatic principle) which current research suggests are responsible for expressing temporal reference in Mandarin. We used methods from the field of corpus linguistics, such as translational spotting, data coding (when no metalinguistic judgement is necessary) and data annotation (when a metalinguistic judgement is required). Our quantitative analyses indicate that, contrary to what is predicted by non-empirical studies, aspectual particles are infrequent and their role in expressing temporal reference is questionable. In contrast, temporal adverbs and adverbials play a significant role in expressing reference to past and future time, whereas linguistically non-marked situations are most frequently located in the present. In accordance with the Bounded Event Constraint, the lexical aspect of situations is central to the determination of temporal reference: events are largely located in the past, and states in the present. These results are interpreted in a relevance-theoretic model of temporal reference, according to which hearers treat temporal information coming from various cues in a cognitively coherent manner. A series of differences has been found regarding the role of the factors examined for Mandarin as a source and as a target language, partially supporting the assumption of translation universals.
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Notes
To avoid terminological confusion, we use the term temporal reference to refer to the localization of situations in time, and tense as its morphological marking. In this sense, Mandarin is tenseless. Some researchers, such as Li (2012), distinguish temporal reference (which can be overtly indicated by temporal adverbials) and aspectual reference (which is expressed by perfective and imperfective aspectual particles, as well as lexical aspect). In this study, we follow Tonhauser (2015) in treating aspectual particles and lexical aspect as factors responsible for temporal reference.
Here, the notion of marking versus non-marking refers strictly to the presence versus the absence of a linguistic marker (aspectual or temporal) which co-occurs with the verb.
The sentence-final -le can co-occur with -guo (e.g. 这篇文章我看过了 Zhe pian wenzhang wo kan-guo le ‘I’ve read this article’. But combinations of the post-verbal -le (i.e. the perfective -le) and -guo are not acceptable (e.g. *我看过了这篇文章Wo kan-guo le zhe pian wenzhang ‘I’ve read this article’). (cf. Li and Thompson 1981: 237).
In our corpora, we identified very few occurrences of sentence-final -le, probably due to the writing style of texts published on government or news websites, and even fewer imperfective uses of post-verbal -le. Thus, we followed the conventional approach of coding the particle -le identified in our corpora as a perfective marker.
Zai can also be used as a preposition to indicate the location where a situation occurs (zai + location). The preposition zai can appear either before or after the verb, whereas the aspectual particle zai can be only preverbal (zai + VP).
To be specific, when ti “raise” and -dao “attain” combine, they form a new verb tidao “mention”. Nevertheless, in zhuyi-dao “notice-dao”, the use of -dao “attain” does not change the meaning of the verb zhuyi “notice”.
This example is constructed from the following example, cited from Li (2012: 2046): 我1980年出生 Wo 1980 nian chusheng ‘I was born in 1980’. She argued that temporal adverbials “never occur after the verb” (2012: 2048); we instead contend that they may occur in post-verbal position, although this is rare.
Jiang “will” may be classified as either an adverb (Li 2012) or a modal verb (Smith and Erbaugh 2005). In this study, we follow Li (2012) in treating jiang “will” as an adverb, and Li and Thompson (1981) in distinguishing the modal yao “should/want” from the adverb yao “will”. The former is analysed like other modal verbs (e.g. keneng “possibly/probably”, nenggou “can” and yinggai “should”) as conveying modal information which may imply a relative future interpretation, whereas the latter is considered to indicate temporal reference directly.
According to Smith’s (2003: 26–30) classification, Narrative refers to “a sequence of events and states that have the same participants” and advances the temporal progression “with bounded events, and explicit temporal adverbials”. Report gives “an account of situations from the temporal standpoint of the reporter” and is “mainly concerned with events and states”. Passages of Description are “static and within the scope of a tacit time adverbial”.
The two independent annotators were Author (Juan Sun) and a second speaker of Mandarin.
This narrow definition of boundedness, referring to intrinsic properties of situations, does not take into account the fact that situations can be presented as bounded or unbounded with temporal adverbials, RVCs and PPs (what Li 2012 calls bounding expressions in Mandarin). In our annotation experiment, the entire VP (verb and its obligatory complement) was considered when judging lexical aspect and boundedness (for example, run is an unbounded activity, whereas run two kilometres is a bounded event).
In generalized mixed models, only binary dependent variables are relatively easy to implement and, most importantly, to interpret, especially when there are several independent variables (as is the case in our study) (cf. manuals of quantitative statistics on linguistic data by Baayen 2008 and Johnson 2008).
It is worth mentioning that the introduction to Li (2012: 2045) states that “[i]n natural discourse, the majority of clauses show no use of aspectual markers”. However, Li provides neither empirical nor quantitative evidence for this claim.
This is in contrast with Li (2012), who distinguishes between temporal and aspectual reference, and treats both lexical aspect and grammatical aspect as expressing aspectual reference. This distinction is due to word order in Mandarin. Li (2012: 2045) writes that “generally speaking, situations’ temporal and physical locations are indicated before the main verb, while aspectual information is provided after the verb.” Additionally, “temporal reference is essentially a discourse phenomenon, managed to a large extent through cross-clausal references. Aspectual reference, by comparison, operates at the clause level”.
Markedness refers to a state in which one linguistic element is more distinctively identified (or marked) than another (unmarked) element. For Leech (2006), in cases of contrast between two or more members of a category (such as number, case, or tense), one of them is called marked if it contains some extra affix, as opposed to the unmarked member of the category, which does not.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been carried out within the Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project of Guangdong Province during the “13th Five-Year” (No. GD17XWW20), the Youth Program of Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (No. 18YJCZH155), as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation for the VTS Project (“Verbal tenses and subjectivity: an empirical cognitive approach; No. 100015_170008/1).
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Sun, J., Grisot, C. Expressing Temporal Reference in Mandarin: A Quantitative Study Using Translation Corpora. Corpus Pragmatics 4, 207–241 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-020-00077-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-020-00077-x