Pluractionality and Mandarin Durative Adverbs

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese durative adverb yizhi (一直) appears to impart a temporally unrestricted reading. Interestingly, yizhi can co-occur with sentences that convey a temporally limited meaning. In this study, we point out that yizhi serves to pluractionize an eventuality; in other words, it functions to derive a plural reading from a single state of affairs. The pluralizing nature of yizhi helps explain its syntactic distribution. Apart from yizhi, the semantic attributes and syntactic manifestation of durative adverbs butingde (不停的) and buduande (不斷的) are also brought into discussion. This study provides evidence that the mechanism of pluractionality exists in Mandarin Chinese just like other languages. Moreover, it implies that semantics must be taken into account when we explore the syntactic facets of language.