Abstract
The experiential marker guo exp in Mandarin expresses an event which has happened at least once before. Previous studies have provided valuable observations of the guo exp -sentences; however, the suggested properties are seemingly unrelated. In this paper, the experiential marker guo exp is treated as a temporal quantifier, an analysis which unifies the properties of a guo exp -sentence described in literature. The analysis is motivated by the two common characteristics shared by guo exp and other temporal quantifiers such as sometimes, always, etc. First, both sentences present a type of situation rather than a specific one. Second, these sentences are not temporally related to other events in a discourse. The semantics of guo exp is represented in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory in which temporal quantifiers can be treated uniformly.
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This is a revised version of my dissertation. I thank Manfred Krifka and Carlota Smith for their comments on the various drafts. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers. Their suggestions have improved this paper tremendously.
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Yeh, M. An analysis of the experiential guo exp in Mandarin: A temporal quantifier. J East Asian Linguis 5, 151–182 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00215072
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00215072