The experiential aspect of Mandarin Chinese (-guo): Semantics and pragmatics

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ScienceDirect Lingua 229 (2019) 102714 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

The experiential aspect of Mandarin Chinese (-guo): Semantics and pragmatics Hongzhi Xu * University of Pennsylvania, USA Received 21 February 2019; received in revised form 8 May 2019; accepted 14 July 2019 Available online 15 August 2019

Abstract The study of the Chinese experiential aspect expressed by -guo is an important research topic in both Chinese theoretical linguistics and the semantics-pragmatics interface more broadly. Previous studies propose that the semantics of -guo has the property of what is called repeatability, and/or discontinuity. In this article, I show that previous theories do not adequately explain the distributional pattern of -guo. The semantics of -guo therefore remains unclear. Based on a comprehensive observation of the experiential aspect marker -guo, I propose that (1) -guo semantically is an existential quantifier indicating a non-empty set of a type of eventuality in a certain time frame which is presupposed to be before a reference time, and with this new proposal, the so-called perfective -guo described by previous studies can be explained in the same framework, and thus the two -guos can be unified; (2) the discontinuity property can be accounted for from a pragmatic perspective under the notion of Question Under Discussion (Roberts, 1996). © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Chinese aspect; -guo; Experiential marker; Semantics-pragmatics interface; Quantifiers

1. Introduction The semantics of the experiential aspect marker guo (-guo, henceforth) has been a frequently studied topic in Chinese Linguistics. It is proposed that its basic meaning is to express the existence of an event in the indefinite past, the result state of which, if any, has been discontinued at a reference time (Chao, 1968; Iljic, 1990; Smith, 1997, and many others). For example, sentence 1 literally means that John has some experience of being in Beijing in the past. But it also implies that John is not in Beijing at the speech time, or if he is, there must have been at least one moment before the speech time at which he was not in Beijing, i.e. the state of John being in Beijing once discontinued. (1) yuehan qu-guo beijing. John go.EXP Beijing ‘John has been to Beijing.’

* Corresponding author at: CIS, Levine Hall, 3330 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102714 0024-3841/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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This property of -guo is also compared with the perfective aspect marker le (-le, henceforth), which, on the contrary, does not require the discontinuity of the result state. For example, sentence 2 can be uttered when John is still in Beijing. (2) yuehan qu-le beijing. John go.PERF Beijing ‘John has gone to Beijing.’

One analysis argues that -guo requires that the event it takes as an argument should have the property of repeatability/recurrence (Smith, 1997; Ma, 1977; Li and Thompson, 1981; Yeh, 1996; Lin, 2006, 2007). As support, they note that verbs such as si ‘die’ or shasi ‘kill’, which denote a non-repeatable event, cannot co-occur with -guo, as illustrated in 3. (3) a. *yuehan si-guo. John die.EXP ‘John has died (he is alive now).’ b. *yuehan shasi-guo mali. John kill.EXP Mary ‘John once killed Mary (Mary is alive now).’

However, it is observed that not all verbs that denote non-repeatable events are incompatible with -guo (Iljic, 1990; Lin, 2006; Chen, 1979; Pan and Lee, 2004). As shown by 4a, the verb nianqing ‘be young’, denoting a prototypical nonrepeatable event, can co-occur with -guo, but a closely related non-repeatable verb lao ‘be old’ cannot, as shown in 4b. This supports that the verbs taken by -guo should have a discontinuity property/change-out-of-state/terminability (Iljic, 1990; Pan and Lee, 2004; Wu, 2008). The contrast between 4a and 4b is that the state of being young can be discontinued, while the state of being old cannot. (4) a. ni ye nianqing-guo. you also young.EXP ‘You were young before.’ b. *ni ye lao-guo. you also old.EXP ‘You were once old (you are not now).’

Defining the semantics of -guo in terms of discontinuity is not without issues either. Lin (2006) further observed that the definiteness of the verb's object can affect the discontinuity property of -guo. For example, sentence 5a with a definite object zhe bu diannao ‘this CL computer’ shows the discontinuity property of -guo, namely the computer must have been fixed at the time of the utterance, which contradicts the second sub sentence. On the contrary, sentence 5b with an indefinite object yi bu diannao ‘one CL computer’ shows the opposite pattern, that is the computer is not necessarily fixed at the speech time, namely the discontinuity property of -guo does not hold. (5) a. *yuehan nonghuai-guo zhe bu diannao, xianzai hai mei xiuhao. John break.EXP this CL computer now still not fix ‘(intended) John broke this computer before, and it has not been fixed yet.’ b. yuehan nonghuai-guo yi bu diannao, xianzai hai mei xiuhao. John break.EXP one CL computer now still not fix ‘John broke a computer, and it has not been fixed yet.’ This poses a challenge for the proposal that takes the discontinuity property as a semantic component of -guo. In this case, the repeatability analysis makes better predictions. Yeh (1996) thus insists on repeatability as a component of the semantics of -guo and argues with evidence that the once-only predicates such as nianqing ‘be young’ as shown in 4a are an exception that should be treated differently. Lin (2007) takes the discontinuity property as a presupposition of -guo and

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introduces the concept of inertia world to account for the effect caused by the definiteness of the objects. Details will be given in the next section. Although there are many different theories for explaining the data above, they all fail to explain the use of -guo in all possible situations. Furthermore, most of them suggest that such effects should be accounted for by the semantics of -guo. This means that the unacceptability of 3a, 3b and 4b is due to their semantic ill-formedness. This predicts that the predicate lao ‘be old’ cannot co-occur with -guo in a negative context either since the negation is outside the scope of -guo, namely not(guo(. . .)) in logic form. However, this contradicts the facts, as shown by the examples in 6. (6) a. ni mei lao-guo, zenme zhidao lao de ganshou. you not old.EXP how know old DE feel ‘You have not been old, how could you know how it feels?’ b. ni mei si-guo, zenme hui zhidao si shi shenme yangzi. you not die.EXP how will know death be what look-like ‘You have not been dead before. How do you know how it is like to be dead?’ By observing more data, we can find that, even in positive context, some -guo sentences do not show the discontinuity property. For example, the example in 7 shows a completely different effect from 1 in that it is compatible with the case that at the speech time the speaker is in Beijing for the first time. This sentence can be used e.g. when the speaker accomplishes his dream of going to Beijing. His dream becomes true immediately after he arrived at Beijing. The accomplishment of his dream here is indicated by the sentence final particle le ‘LE’.1 Thus the discontinuity does not hold. (7) wo zhongyu lai-guo beijing le. I finally come.EXP Beijing LE ‘I finally have been to Beijing.’ In certain contexts, even verbs that describe non-repeatable events such as shasi ‘kill’ can be used with -guo. For example, sentence 8 expresses that the event Qin Shihuang killing the speaker's grandfather exists in the past, without implying that his grandfather had become alive again. Thus, the discontinuity property does not hold here. (8) yin dangnian qinshihuang shasi-guo tade zufu dongfei, yinci xin zhong huai hen. (Ch5, xunlongji) his grandfather Dong_Fei therefore heart inside bear hatred Searching_Dragon because that_year Qin_Shihuang kill.EXP ‘Because Qin Shihuang (the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty) once killed his grandfather Dong Fei, he still bears hatred to him in his mind.’

Moreover, some -guo sentences show compatibility with both possibilities of the discontinuity being true or not. For example, the utterance 9a is not concerned with John's current status (whether being married again or not). Thus, it is compatible with both possibilities, namely John is married again 9b or he is not 9c. (9) a. yuehan li-guo-hun. John divorce.EXP ‘John once divorced.’ b. dao xianzai ye meiyou zai jiehun. till now still not again marry ‘(John divorced) and he didn’t get married again.’ you jiehun-le. c. houlai afterwards again marry.PERF. ‘(John divorced) and afterwards he got married again.’ The examples from 6 to 9 challenge the proposals that take the discontinuity property as a semantic component of -guo. On the basis of these examples, I will follow Pan and Lee (2004)'s pragmatic perspective that the discontinuity

1 Note that in Chinese there are two different les, which have the same orthography. One (henceforth, -le) is attached to a verb as shown in 2 and the other (henceforth ‘LE’) is a sentence final particle as shown here in 7, whose meaning is to indicate a currently relevant state. Refer to Chao (1968), Li and Thompson (1981) for more details.

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property is only a conversational implicature triggered by context. However, differently, I will introduce the notion of Question Under Discussion (QUD), proposed by Roberts (1996). In Section 2, I introduce some previous studies that are closely related to the current discussion. In Section 3, I discuss the examples from 6 to 9 and tease apart the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause the different interpretations of the discontinuity effect of -guo sentences. I show that the discontinuity property should be accounted for in pragmatics. Then, the core semantics of -guo will be defined as an existential quantifier that indicates a non-empty set of eventualities of a certain type, in line with Iljic (1990), Yeh (1996). I will discuss in Section 4 the discontinuity phenomena from a pragmatic perspective. I show that the discontinuity property can be accounted for using the notion of Question Under Discussion (Roberts, 1996). 2. Related studies The literature on the Chinese aspectual marker -guo is hard to exhaustively describe. Here, I only review several important works that are especially relevant to this article, including Yeh (1996), Lin (2006, 2007), Pan and Lee (2004). 2.1. Yeh (1996) Yeh (1996) adopts the Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) to account for the semantics of -guo and proposes that -guo is a temporal quantifier, which forms an independent sub discourse structure (DS). The eventualities described in this sub-DS are not directly accessible to the succeeding sentences. As shown in 10, the individual eventualities of Xiaochen going fishing implied by the -guo sentence are not directly accessible, unless there is a quantifier, e.g., the adverb zongshi ‘always’, that can iterate over the individual eventualities. (10) a. xiaochen qu hebian diao-guo yu. Xiaochen go river_side angle.EXP fish ‘Xiaochen has been to the river side for fishing.’ banye cai huijia. b. *(zongshi) diao dao always angle until midnight then go_home ‘He *(always) angled to midnight, before he went home.’ Then, Yeh proposes that repeatability (an equivalent term to recurrence) is a semantic property of -guo, which can be accounted for by the Plurality Condition on Quantification (De Swart, 1991). This explains the fact that non-repeatable predicates such as si ‘die’ cannot co-occur with -guo since one can only die once, as in (3). The Plurality Condition constraint can also explain the definiteness and indefiniteness asymmetry shown in 5. For 5a, in order to satisfy the constraint, the object zhe bu diannao ‘this computer’ needs to be fixed before the event of breaking this computer can happen again. On the other hand, the event of breaking a computer as in 5b can be repeated by breaking a different computer. Yeh (1996)'s analysis based on DRT suggests that -guo selects an eventuality type as its argument and indicates a non-empty set of eventualities of that type. A counterexample to her analysis is that some non-repeatable predicates such as nianqing ‘be young’ as in 4a can perfectly occur with -guo. Finally, Yeh decides to treat these examples as exceptions that should be accounted for separately. 2.2. Pan and Lee (2004) Pan and Lee (2004) argue that the discontinuity property (change-out-of-state) should be accounted for in a pragmatic perspective. The main idea is based on contrasting -guo with -le. The discontinuity property of -guo only arises when the contrast of -guo and -le exist, where the use of -guo or -le follows the pragmatic constraint in 11. (11) Use -guo when describing a change out of state and/or partial realization of the relevant situation; otherwise, use -le when describing the continuation of the RS and/or total realization of the situation in question (Pan and Lee, 2004, pp. 457). A semantic constraint is imposed that the rule 11 only applies when the contrast between -guo and -le exists, i.e. the verb predicate can possibly take both -guo and -le. For example, the predicates lao ‘be old’ as in 4b and si ‘die’ as in 3a impose a semantic constraint that it is not possible to change the state of being old to another state. This means that only

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-le is possible. In this case, rule 11 does not apply. In contrary, the predicate nianqing ‘be young’ as in 4a does not have this constraint and is thus compatible with both -guo and -le. So, it predicts that the discontinuity holds. Similarly, the predicate qu beijing ‘go to Beijing’ is compatible with both -guo and -le as in 1 and 2 respectively. So, rule 11 applies, which predicts that the discontinuity holds in 1. The theory uses the semantic constraint to rule out the unacceptable predicates, such as si ‘die’ and lao ‘be old’ as in 3a and 4b. This means that the theory actually takes ‘change-out-of-state’ as a part of semantics of -guo, this contradicts the claim that the ‘change-out-of-state’ property is pragmatic and can be explained by the pragmatic rule 11. In addition, Lin (2007) pointed out that rule 11 fails to account for the asymmetry between definiteness and indefiniteness of the objects in -guo sentences, as shown in 5. It wrongly predicts that 5b, where the indefinite object yi bu diannao ‘a computer’ is used, should also show the discontinuity property. 2.3. Lin (2006, 2007) Lin (2006) proposes that the meaning of -guo consists of two parts. The first part consists of the temporal semantics of -guo and the other part is the presupposition requiring that the predicate must represent a repeatable event. Formally, the first part can be represented as in 12. (12) The temporal semantics of -guo (Lin, 2006, pp. 11): vguo b = lPltToplt0 9 t[P(t) ^ Istage(t, P)  tTop ^ tTop < t0] Where Istage(t, P) is defined if P(t) = 1, in which case a. if P is telic, Istage(t, P) = t minus the last point of t; b. if P is atelic, Istage(t, P) = t. What 12 says is that the inner stage (Istage) of an eventuality should be within the topic time tTop, which absolutely proceeds the evaluation time t0. The notion of Istage can deal with the so-called partial reality problem (Huang and Davis, 1989; Pan and Lee, 2004). As shown in 13, the inner stage of the eventuality described as xie yi bu xiaoshuo ‘write a novel’ refers to the writing part, and the last point (when the novel is finished) is not included. This explains why the second subsentence is compatible with the first one. (13) yuehan xie-guo yi bu xiaoshuo, keshi mei xie wan. John write.EXP one CL novel but not write finish ‘John has been writing a novel before, but he didn’t finish it.’ The repeatability constraint in the presupposition explains the definiteness and indefiniteness asymmetry, the same as Yeh (1996). To repeat an event of breaking this computer requires the computer to be fixed, while to repeat an event of breaking a computer does not. However, this proposal fails to account for the fact that predicates such as nianqing ‘young’, which also denote non-repeatable events, can co-occur with -guo. To solve this problem, Lin (2007) gives a new proposal of the semantics of -guo: the Istage of an eventuality e, described by P, should be absolutely before the speech time (or, more accurately, reference time); also, if the event e has a target state (resultative state), then the use of -guo presupposes that there is an inertia world w inr stretching from the current world w such that another eventuality e0 of the same type P but distinct from e is true in it at an interval containing the speech time. Formally, the semantics of -guo is represented in 14. (14) The semantics of -guo (Lin, 2007): Assertion: 9 e 9 w½PðeÞðwÞ ^ tðIstageðe; PÞÞ < s  Presupposition: 9 s½Targetðe; PÞ ¼ s ! 9 w inr 9 e0 ½e0 6¼ e ^ s  tðe0 Þ ^ Pðe0 Þðw inr Þ Compared to Lin (2006), the semantic component tTop has been ignored by Lin (2007). Instead, the only temporal constraint is that the whole Istage (t) of the event is before the speech time s*. The presupposition is a formalization of the repeatability property, which however only applies to telic events. This proposal can explain the contrast between atelic predicates lao ‘old’ and nianqing ‘young’. Since they are atelic predicates, according to the definition of Istage, the whole eventuality should be before the speech time. For nianqing ‘young’, this implies that the subject is not young at the speech time. However, for lao ‘old’, it is impossible that the subject was old but is not old at the speech time. The presupposition also holds, since the premise of the conditional is false. For telic predicates nonghuai zhe bu diannao ‘break this computer’ and nonghuai yi bu diannao ‘break a computer’, the Istage does not include the final state, that of the computer being broken. So, the assertion can be satisfied if there was

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such an eventuality e in the past. On the other hand, the presupposition requires that there should be a different eventuality of the same kind occurring in a possible inertia world. To satisfy this, the definite object zhe bu diannao ‘this computer’ has to be fixed, while the indefinite object yi bu diannao ‘a computer’ does not have to be fixed, as there could be a different one in the inertia world. It should also be noted that the presupposition is formalized as a conditional, which can be paraphrased as either the event e does not exist at all or it has to be repeatable in an inertia world. This has merit when predicting the use of -guo in negative contexts, which then presupposes nothing since the premise is false. This is consistent with our intuition that the negation of -guo simply claims that the eventuality of the kind P does not exist. However, the definition of Istage is problematic when -guo takes a punctual event, e.g. change-of-state (achievement) predicates such as si ‘die’ and swangji ‘forget’. According to the definition, the Istage of punctual events is null (namely punctual events have no inner stage). This will cause problems when we interpret the statement that some null time point is before the speech time, i.e. t(Istage(e, P)) < s*. Finally, as mentioned above, the semantic account of the discontinuity properties of -guo is incompatible with the fact that it can be cancelled in certain contexts. Lin (2006, 2007)'s proposal cannot explain the examples from 6 to 9, where the discontinuity does not hold.

2.4. An interim summary I have discussed several important analyses of the discontinuity property of -guo. I show that these theories fail to explain all the observed cases, especially the examples from 6 to 9. The most important problem of the theories is that they all assume that -guo sentences can only have one possible interpretation, ignoring the role played by context. As we can see that the same verb shasi ‘kill’ can show different patterns in different context, e.g. 3b vs. 8. Thus, a new proposal of the semantics of -guo is needed with the discontinuity effect analyzed using principles of pragmatics by taking context into account.

3. The semantics of -guo In this section, I discuss the examples that are mentioned in Section 1 including both those that have been observed by previous studies, e.g. examples from 1 to 5, and those that are not covered by previous studies, e.g. examples from 6 to 9. Then I will try to tease apart the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause the discontinuity effect of -guo sentences. Then, a new proposal of the semantics of -guo will be given by observing the truth conditions of -guo sentences. Finally, several related issues will be discussed, such as the use of -guo in negative contexts. I also show that the so-called perfective -guo and experiential -guo can be unified.

3.1. Semantics vs. world knowledge It is worth mentioning the difference between semantic ill-formedness and infelicity. First, let's look at the examples which some of the previous studies considered as semantically ill-formed including 3a, 3b, and 4b, repeated in 15. (15) a. *yuehan si-guo. John die.EXP ‘John has died (he is alive now).’ b. *yuehan shasi-guo mali. John kill.EXP Mary ‘John once killed Mary (Mary is alive now).’ c. *ni ye lao-guo. you also old.EXP ‘You were once old (you are not now).’ Imagine we are in a possible world, e.g. the virtual world in a video game, where people can become young from being old and become alive again after death by magic. Then, these sentences would be perfectly acceptable. This suggests that the sentences are in fact semantically well-formed. The unacceptability of them is due to the discontinuity of the state implied by -guo contradicting our world knowledge. In detail, the implications that John becomes alive after death as of

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15a, Mary becomes alive after being killed as of 15b, and the addressee becomes young after being old as of 15c counter our knowledge that a person cannot become alive again after death or become young again after being old. Therefore, the phenomenon shown in 15 is nothing special but simply an effect due to the discontinuity caused by -guo.

3.2. Multiple interpretations of -guo sentences in different contexts As mentioned above, all the previous studies assume that a -guo sentence only has one possible interpretation in terms of discontinuity in different contexts. But is this in fact true? We have already seen that similar sentences can have different discontinuity effects, e.g., example 1 vs. 7, repeated in 16, and example 3b vs. 8, repeated in 17b, where the discontinuity holds in 16a and 17a but not in 16b and 17b. (16) a. yuehan qu-guo beijing. John go.EXP Beijing ‘John has been to Beijing.’ b. wo zhongyu lai-guo beijing le. I finally come.EXP Beijing LE ‘I finally have been to Beijing (here).’ (17) a. *yuehan shasi-guo mali. kill.EXP Mary John ‘John once killed Mary (Mary is alive now).’ dangnian qinshihuang shasi-guo tade zufu dongfei, yinci xin zhong huai hen. b. yin his grandfather Dong_Fei therefore heart inside bear hatred because that_year Qin_Shihuang kill.EXP ‘Because Qin Shihuang (the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty) once killed his grandfather Dong Fei, he still bears hatred to him in his mind.’

Even for the exact same sentence, it can have different interpretation in different contexts. As shown in 18, which sets up the context that John is in Beijing for the first time at the time when the question 18a is asked, it is clear that the answer should be ‘YES’. The answer ‘NO’ is not available in any possible situations.2 This shows that the discontinuity effect of sentence 1 can be cancelled in this context as in 18b. (18) Context: John is in Beijing for the first time. The speaker B knows this fact, but A doesn’t. beijing ma? a. A: yuehan qu-guo A: John go.EXP Beijing MA ‘A: Has John been to Beijing?’ xianzai jiu zai beijing. b. B: qu-guo, shishishang ta B: go.EXP in_fact he now right at Beijing B: ‘Yes, in fact he is in Beijing right now.’ Telic predicates, such as nonghuai ‘break’ as shown in 5, can have the same effect in a similar context. This can be shown in 19. When answering the question 19a, the use of -guo as in 19b does not imply that the computer has been fixed. (19) Context: There is a computer in the context: Computer A (referred as ‘this computer’) is broken by John and has NOT been fixed yet. a. A: yuehan youmeiyou nonghuai-guo zhe bu diannao? A: John have-not-have break.EXP this CL computer ‘A: Did John once break his computer?’

2 Here, the predicate qu-guo Beijing ‘have been to Beijing’ is similar to zai Beijing dai-guo ‘be once in Beijing’, while the directional verb qu go mainly indicates that the speaker is not in Beijing at the speech time. So, if a person was born in Beijing and never left there, it is still true that ta quguo Beijing ‘he has been to Beijing’.

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b. B: nonghuai-guo, shishishang xianzai B: break.EXP in_fact now B: ‘Yes, in fact it has not been fixed yet.’

hai still

meiyou not

xiuhao. fixed

Besides examples from 16 to 19, example 9 also shows that a -guo sentence can be neutral when interpreting whether the discontinuity holds or not, namely it prefers neither of the two possibilities. Cancellable interpretations are a hallmark diagnostic of pragmatic effects. The fact that the discontinuity effect can be cancelled in certain contexts has sufficiently proved that the discontinuity effect is merely a pragmatic effect rather than a semantic property of -guo. The next question is then what the semantics of -guo actually is and how we can explain the discontinuity effect from a perspective outside semantics. 3.3. The truth condition of -guo sentences Although previous studies differ in how to account for the discontinuity property, there is a consensus that -guo indicates that a certain kind of event exists in a certain period (Chao, 1968; Yeh, 1996). From the perspective of truth conditional semantics, to make a -guo sentence true, we need to find an event of the kind described in the sentence in a certain period, usually before the speech time. For example, to make sentence 1 true or to make the answer of question 18a ‘YES’, there should be a moment before the speech time that the subject John is in Beijing. Similarly, to make the answer of question 19a ‘YES’, there should be an event in the past in which the subject John broke the computer. Lin (2006, 2007)'s theory is a little different from Chao (1968), Yeh (1996) in that -guo only requires that the Istage of the event exists in the period. As mentioned before, the Istage can account for the partial reality problem. For example, sentence 13 shows that to make the first sub-sentence true, it only requires that the Istage of the event described as xie yi bu xiaoshuo ‘write a CL novel’ exists before the speech time, even though the last moment, namely the novel being finished, is not met. Now, it is necessary to find out whether the notion of Istage is needed when describing the semantics of -guo. In fact, the perfective marker -le has a similar effect as in 20. In this case, we do not want to claim that the semantics of perfective -le is to indicate the finishing of only the Istage of the event rather than the whole event. (20) yuehan xie-le yi bu xiaoshuo, keshi mei xie wan. John write.PERF one CL novel but not write finish ‘John wrote a novel, but he didn’t finish it.’ Here, I suggest that the partial reality problem is independent of the semantics of -guo, and the notion of Istage is not necessary. The partial reality problem is related to the study of lexical aspect in terms of what is called incremental theme or measuring out of events (Dowty, 1991; Tenny, 1994). Vendler (1957) differentiates four situation types of verbs, namely state, activity, accomplishment and achievement. The former two are atelic (homogeneous) and the latter two are telic (heterogeneous). Telic events cannot establish their identity until the culminating point is reached (Moens, 1987; Tenny, 1987; Jackendoff, 1991; Xu, 2015, and many others). For an atelic event, any of its subpart can form a subevent of the same kind. For example, a part of an event ‘being in Beijing’ is also ‘being in Beijing’, while a subpart of ‘writing a novel’ is not an event that can be called ‘writing a novel’. Correspondingly, the verbs that take the objects also play a role. For example, ‘building a house’ is different from ‘looking at a house’ in that the former is involved with an object ‘a house’ which does not exist until the whole building action is finished, while in later, the house already exists when the ‘looking’ action is happening. So, the former is usually called incremental theme verb (Dowty, 1991). However, what is interesting is that such verbs can appear in imperfective aspect, e.g. progressive forms, perfectly, such as ‘John is building a house’ and ‘John is writing a novel’. The Chinese shows the same effect either, as shown in 21. (21) yuehan zhengzai xie yi bu xiaoshuo. John PROG write one CL novel ‘John is write a novel now.’ The question is that how can we refer to a non-existing object in an progressive form? One explanation is that such incremental theme is an abstract psychological object that serves as an intentional goal of certain actions, e.g. building and writing actions (Xu, 2015). In this case, the event xie yi bu xiao shuo ‘write one CL novel’ can be rephrased as ‘writing something with the intention of finishing a novel’. Thus, a subpart of this event is of the same kind, therefore the homogeneity property holds. In detail, the sentence 13 can simply mean that John was once involved in such writing activity, but his goal was not finally accomplished.

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Actually, there are indeed studies showing that the ‘verb+numeralNP’ in Chinese show different telicity/homogeneity patterns from English. In English, ‘writing a novel’ denotes an accomplishment. So, the English sentence ‘he wrote a novel, but the novel is not finished’ is ungrammatical. On the contrary, the Chinese counterpart xie yi bu xiao shuo ‘write one CL novel’ shows a different pattern as shown in 20, meaning that a subpart of the event xie yi bu xiao shuo ‘write one CL novel’ can somehow be called the same event. Tai (1984) suggests that such Chinese VO constructions have no accomplishment readings. Chen (2018) shows with empirical studies that Chinese monosyllabic verbs, such as sha ‘kill’, do not always imply change of state, suggesting that Chinese does not lexicalize change of state at all. Xu (2015) suggests that such Chinese VO constructions can be interpreted as either an intentional goal or a result. He also shows that different from the example in 13, some other VO constructions in Chinese are hard to be interpreted as an intentional goal, and a resultative reading is then preferred. For example, the predicate he 2.7 jialun pijiu ‘drink 2.7-gallons beer’ shows a different acceptability status from 13, as shown in 22a. In this case, the object 2.7 jialun pijiu ‘2.7-gallons beer’ is not a meaningful unit and is hard to be interpreted as an intentional goal. On the other hand, it is only the result of an activity when such activity is stopped, or in another term, it is a quantification that measures an activity (Krifka, 1989). Correspondingly, we can predict that such quantification object cannot appear in a progressive form either, which is indeed the case, as shown in 22b. (22) a. *yuehan he-guo 2.7-jialun pijiu, keshi mei he-wan. John drink.EXP 2.7-gallon beer but not drink-finish ‘John once drank 2.7 gallons of beer, but didn’t finish it’ b. *yuehan zhengzai he 2.7-jialun pijiu. John PROG drink 2.7-gallon beer ‘John is drinking 2.7 gallons of beer.’ Note, however, that the oddness of the sentences in 22a and 22b comes from the pragmatic level in that why John intends to drink ‘2.7-gallons beer’. This oddness can be resolved if it indeed becomes a meaningful unit in certain context. Correspondingly, the sentence 22b will have equal acceptability status to 22a. To give one more example, let's see another predicate pao 10,000 mi ‘run ten thousand meters’, with the same construction of he 2.7 jialun pijiu ‘drink 2.7gallons beer’. Surprisingly, they show completely different effects, as shown in 23. The difference between the two different is that the former can serve as a meaningful intentional goal, namely running with the intention to finish the whole race, while the latter is not. (23) a. yuehan pao-guo 10,000-mi, keshi mei pao-wan. John run.EXP 10,000-meter but not run-finish ‘John was once running a 10,000-meter race, but didn’t finish it’ b. yuehan zhengzai pao 10,000-mi. John PROG run 10,000-meter ‘John is running a 10,000-meter race now.’ Furthermore, if the verb in the VO construction is a Resultative Verbal Compound (RVC), then only the resultative interpretation is preferred since it denotes a heterogeneous (telic) event. For example, the verb nonghuai ‘break-broken’ in 24 is an RVC, and thus the homogeneity does not hold. (24) *yuehan nonghuai-guo zhe bu diannao, keshi zhe bu diannao mei huai. John break.EXP this CL computer but this CL computer not break ‘John broke this computer, but the computer is not broken.’ To conclude, the pattern as shown in 13 can happen only for events with an incremental theme. On the other hand, we can see that the partial reality problem correlates to the homogeneity (telicity) of the event. This well supports that it is the telicity interpretation of the predicates that affects the acceptability of sentences like 13, rather than from the semantic constraint of -guo. The interaction between the two only lies in when we are trying to find some eventualities of the kind predicated by the VO constructions in the sentence. For homogeneous (atelic) events, as long as we can find a subpart (or whole) of an event of the kind described, the whole sentence is true since the subpart is of the same kind. For heterogeneous (telic) events, we need to find a whole event of the kind as described in the -guo sentence to make it true. In other words, the truth condition of a -guo sentence is independent from the homogeneity of the event predicate it takes.

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The semantics of -guo only requires that there is an eventuality that can be described by the predicate. Thus, the notion Istage (Lin, 2006, 2007) can be excluded from the semantics of -guo. 3.4. Time frame as a semantic component of -guo We have shown that the semantics of -guo is not coupled with the internal structures of events and the truth condition of -guo sentences is that there exists an event that can be described by the predicate in the sentence. So, to evaluate the truth value of -guo sentences, we can simply count the number of events of the specific type and see whether it is larger than zero. This raises another question: what time interval should we consider when counting? We suggest that -guo has an implicit argument, the time frame (TF), based on which the cardinality of the set of eventualities is calculated. Such TFs, however, are not always explicitly specified in real cases. When the TF is not explicitly expressed, it can always be inferred from the context. As in 1, although the TF is not specified explicitly, our intuition tells us that the whole period before (and possibly including) the speech time (ST), i.e., ( 1 , ST], should be considered. When the TF is explicitly given, it becomes clear. As in 25, the time phrase 2015 nian ‘year 2015’ indicates that the period in which we count the events should be within 2015. (25) yuehan 2015-nian qu-guo san ci beijing. John year_2015 go.EXP three CL Beijing ‘John went to Beijing three times in 2015.’ A TF is not necessarily a single continuous time interval. Theoretically, it can be any set of periods or points on the time axis. As an example, sentence 26 describes a non-empty set of events, which happens in a series of nonconsecutive classes. Any other events of the same kind that happen outside these classes will not be counted when evaluating the truth of the sentence. (26) yuehan zai ketang shang yundao-guo. John PREP class POSTP faint.EXP ‘John once fainted in class.’ We can see that a TF is necessary when we evaluate the truth value of -guo sentences by counting the number of events of the specific kind. The TF can be explicitly provided in sentences or can be determined by contexts. 3.5. Reference time and the presupposition of -guo It is shown that -guo is difficult to be used in the future (compared to ST). This means that the TF should be in the past, i. e. TF  ( 1 , ST]. For example, supposing that the current year is 2018, the sentence 27a is acceptable, but 27b is not. (27) Context: the speech time is in 2018. ci beijing. a. yuehan 2015-nian qu-guo san John year_2015 go.EXP three CL Beijing ‘John went to Beijing three times in 2015.’ b. *yuehan 2020-nian jiang qu-guo san ci beijing. John year_2020 will go.EXP three CL Beijing ‘John will have been to Beijing three times in 2020.’ However, by setting up a proper reference time (RT), it is indeed possible to use -guo to indicate events in the future. Informally, RT can be defined as a time point, at which the -guo sentence is evaluated.3 In other words, it is the time point where the speaker stands when talking about some one has a certain kind of experience. So, the RT here is the same as Mangione and Li (1993)'s formulation when defining different aspects. As in 28, the RT is set at the end of the year 2020. Then, -guo can be used to describe that John has the experience of being in Beijing three times in 2020, which is before the RT, the end of the year 2020.4

3 4

Lin (2006) uses evaluation time in his notation. But it has the same denotation. Here, I use the term PAST and FUTURE as compared to the ST. So, there are no notions like relative past and relative future in our framework.

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(28) dao 2020-nian niandi yuehan yinggai yijing qu-guo san ci beijing le. to Year_2020 end John should already go.EXP three CL Beijing LE ‘By the end of the next year, John will have been to Beijing three times.’ This suggests that -guo requires that the TF should be before the RT rather than the ST, although very often the RT is the ST. On the other hand, it is not possible to use -guo when a part of the TF is after the RT, even if the RT is in the past (before the ST), as shown in 29. (29) * nashi yuehan ye xiangbudao ta jiexialai de yi nian jiang qu-guo san ci beijing. that_moment John also know-not he the_following DE one year will go.EXP three CL Beijing ‘At that time, John didn’t know that he would have been to Beijing three times in the following year.’ Finally, in the negative or interrogative context where -guo is used, the same requirement, i.e. the TF be before the RT, holds. This can be shown in 30. This suggests that the requirement is presupposed by -guo, since it holds in negative and interrogative contexts as well. (30) Context: the speech time is in 2018. a. yuehan 2015-nian mei qu-guo John year_2015 not go.EXP ‘John didn’t go to Beijing in 2015.’

beijing. Beijing

b. yuehan 2015-nian qu-guo beijing ma? John year_2015 go.EXP Beijing MA ‘Did John go to Beijing in 2015.’ qu-guo c. *yuehan 2020-nian jiang mei John year_2020 will not go.EXP ‘John won’t have been to Beijing in 2020.’

beijing. Beijing

d. *yuehan 2020-nian qu-guo beijing ma? John year_2020 go.EXP Beijing MA ‘Will John have been to Beijing in 2020?’ In sum, we see that -guo sentences presuppose that the TF is before the RT. In other words, the presupposition says that when we stand at a time point, we can only talk about our experience before that time point, i.e. something that already happened at that time. Without being explicitly expressed, the RT is usually the speech time ST and the TF is the whole period before the ST (possibly ending at ST), i.e. ( 1 , ST]. 3.6. A proposal of the semantics of -guo Combining the analyses given above, I propose that the semantics of -guo can be formally defined as in 31.5 (31) a. i. ii. iii. b. i. ii. iii.

5

vguo b = lPlf[9 e[P(e) ^ t(e)  f]], where P is an eventuality type predicate, and f is a TF, and t(e) is the duration of eventuality e Presupposition: 9t0[f = t0], where t0 is the reference time (RT), at which the -guo sentence is evaluated, and f = t0 means that 8t : t 2 f[t = t0]

I adopt the notions from Lin (2006, 2007) and use e to represent an eventuality and use t(e) to denote the duration of e.

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What 31 says is that for a certain eventuality type P, and a time frame f, which is before the reference time t0, there exists at least one eventuality e of type P such that the duration of e is within f. This is equivalent to saying in set notation that if we collect all the eventualities of type P whose durations are within f in a set S, i.e., S = {e : P(e) ^ t(e)  f}, then the cardinality of S is larger than zero. This can be represented as 32. (32) vguo b = lPlf[|{e : P(e) ^ t(e)  f}| = 1] The representation 32 allows us to express the number of eventualities easily. For example, the sentence 25, repeated as 33a can be represented by specifying the value of the cardinality of the set explicitly, as in 33b. (33) a. yuehan 2015-nian qu-guo san ci beijing. John year_2015 go.EXP three CL Beijing ‘John went to Beijing three times in 2015.’ b. |{e:be_in(John, Beijing)(e) ^t(e) YEAR_2015}| =3 It is worth pointing out that the definition of time frame TF in our proposal is different from the topic time (TT), proposed by Klein (1994), Klein et al. (2000), which is followed by Lin (2006). Based on Klein's definition, TT can refer to either a TF or RT, depending on different aspects. For Lin (2006), although he generally adopted Klein's definition of topic time. However, he also introduces evaluation time t0, which is the same as the RT here, which is in line with Mangione and Li (1993).

3.7. The perfective -guo It is assumed that instances of -guo can be sub-divided between an experiential -guo and a perfective -guo. Smith (1997) suggests that the difference between the two -guos lies in whether the expressed events should be specific or simply ones happened in the indefinite past. The perfective -guo refers to a specific eventuality and can be used interchangeably with the perfective marker -le without changing the meaning of the sentence, as shown in 34.6 (34) a. yuehan chi-guo wanfan le. John eat.EXP dinner LE ‘John has eaten his dinner already.’ b. yuehan chi-le wanfan le. John eat.PERF dinner LE ‘John has eaten his dinner already.’ However, it is observed that the -guo and -le show different patterns in negative contexts (Iljic, 1990; Sybesma, 1997). As shown in 35, -guo can co-occur with the negative marker mei ‘not’, while -le cannot. (35) a. yuehan hai mei chi-guo wanfan ne. John still not eat.EXP dinner NE ‘John has not had his dinner yet.’ wanfan ne. b. *yuehan hai mei chi-le John still not eat.PERF dinner NE ‘(intended) John has not eaten his dinner yet.’

6 According to Smith (1997), the sentence 34a is ambiguous due to -guo, namely perfective and experiential. However, only the perfective reading is preferred here. The experiential reading of -guo here (namely John has the experience of eating a dinner in the indefinite past) is not preferred.

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Furthermore, -guo and -le can be used with the same verb as in 36. It is unclear why we need two perfective markers, namely -guo and -le. We may argue that -guo in 35 and 36 is experiential. This however raises a non-trivial question: how we can differentiate between perfective -guo and experiential -guo? That is, we need to explain why -guo in the positive context 34a is perfective while it is experiential in the negative context 35a and why it is perfective when used alone 34a but experiential when it is followed by -le as in 36. (36) yuehan chi-guo-le wanfan le. John eat.EXP.PERF dinner LE ‘John has eaten his dinner already.’ With the new proposal of the semantics of -guo, all the examples in 34, 35, and 36 can be easily explained. Firstly, the truth value of the sentence 34a should be evaluated in a specific dinner session within which the sentence is uttered This can be further supported by the example in 37, where the answer 37d would be pragmatically odd if the listener indeed takes ( 1 , ST] as the TF for evaluation.7 It will also be odd, for example, if the question 37a is uttered in the morning. This suggests that the question 37a implies a specific TF, i.e., the current dinner session. The two different answers as shown in 34a and 37 are exactly corresponding to Smith (1997)'s differentiation of perfective -guo and experiential -guo respectively. By introducing the notion of TF, Smith (1997)'s differentiation of the two different -guos can be accounted for in the same pragmatic framework with TF being interpreted according to the context. (37) a. A: ni chi-guo wanfan le ma? A: you eat.EXP dinner LE MA A: ‘Have you had your dinner?’ b. B: chi-guo-le. B: eat.EXP.PERF B: ‘Yes.’ c. A: shenme A: what A: ‘When?’

shijian chi de? time eat DE

d. B: *zuotian. B: yesterday B: ‘*Yesterday.’ With the TF enriched within a specific context, the meaning similarity of the two sentences in 34 can be explained in that one meal is expected in a specific dinner session. Thus, indicating the non-empty status of the set of eating dinner events with -guo has almost the same effect as to simply express the finishing of this expected event with -le. The meaning of the negation of -guo sentences can be computed in a straightforward way, i.e., indicating an empty set of eventualities of a certain type in a specific TF before the RT. For example, sentence 35a means that the set of events of John eating a meal in the current dinner session before the ST is empty. Similarly, non-repeatable event predicates (e.g. nianqing ‘young’, lao ‘old’, and shasi ‘kill’) can be taken by -guo in the negative context, indicating that the set of such kind of events is empty, namely that they never happened. The combination of -guo and -le as shown in 36, namely le(guo(P)) in logic form, can be easily explained as well. Assuming that -le indicates a change of state, e.g., the start/end of an event or a state, the combination of -guo and -le thus indicates that the set of eventualities becomes non-empty at a certain time point. In other words, if we keep stretching the ending point t of the TF f (i.e., f = ( 1 , t)) and continuously evaluate the truth value of guo(P) within f, then at a certain time point t = t*, (i.e., f = ( 1 , t*)), guo(P) becomes true. So, the meaning of sentence 36 can be described as that the set of events of John eating a meal in the current dinner session becomes non-empty after a time point, i.e. when John finishes his first meal.

7 The answer 37d can be interpreted with an ironic reading. This is possible because TF is not explicitly stated in the question 37a and 37d can pragmatically take ( 1 , ST] as TF. The purpose here, however, is to show that the interpretation of the question 37a relies on the enrichment of the TF information.

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3.8. Consequences We can see that with the new proposal of the semantics of -guo, the so-called perfective -guo can be explained in the same framework. Thus, there is no need to propose two different -guos at all and we can keep a simpler, more parsimonious hypothesis that there is only an experiential marker -guo in Mandarin Chinese. Consequently, I argue that -guo thus has a different status from the perfective -le. The former takes a class (eventuality type predicate) as object, while the individual events are distributed in the indefinite past and are not directly accessible (Yeh, 1996). On the contrary, the latter takes a specific eventuality e in a definite time as its object and indicates its perfective status (Smith, 1997). Based on the semantics of -guo proposed in this section, it is suggested that all the examples with unacceptable status, such as 3, 4b, 5a, 15, 22, etc., are all semantically well-formed. This is significantly different from previous studies. Their meanings can be easily interpreted. In the next section, I will address the question how the oddness of these examples are derived in terms of the discontinuity from a pragmatic perspective. Finally, natural language allows omission (underdeterminancy) of certain contents (Searle, 1985) and such constituents need to be enriched in a specific context, resolving possible ambiguities. I suggest that the implicit argument TF and the presupposed RT are of the same issue of the general pragmatic question how such semantic enrichment can be performed, which is outside the topic of this paper. What this paper aims to address is rather to tease apart the semantic and pragmatic factors when accounting for the discontinuity effect in the language. 3.9. An interim summary I show that the truth condition of the -guo sentences is that the set of eventualities of a certain type within a TF (either explicitly specified or implied by the context) should be non-empty. I further show that the use of -guo presupposes the existence of a reference time RT and that the TF should precede the RT. Based on the proposed semantics, I show that the perfective -guo can be unified with the experiential -guo using the notion of TF and the negation and its combination with verbal -le can be explained straightforwardly. Consequently, most of the unacceptable sentences discussed are suggested to be semantically well-formed. The question remains why the discontinuity property exists in certain contexts and what factors we can use to predict its presence. This will be discussed from a pragmatic perspective in the next section. 4. Pragmatics of -guo In this section, I discuss how the discontinuity property of -guo shown above can be triggered in some contexts. I show that it is closely related to the notion of Question Under Discussion (QUD). QUD is a concept proposed by Roberts (1996) as a part of the formal description of sentential information structure theory, which she shows to be effective in capturing the presuppositions triggered by sentential foci in various ways. Firstly, the semantics of questions are defined as follows: (38) a. The Q-alternatives corresponding to an utterance of a: Q _ alt(a) = {p : 9 ui1, . . ., uin 2 D[p = |b|(ui1) . . . (uin)]}, where: i. a has the logical form whi1, . . ., whin(b), with {whi1, . . ., whin} the (possibly empty) set of wh-elements in a, ii. D is the domain of the model for the language, suitably sortally restricted (e.g., to humans for who, non-humans for what).]] b. Interpretation of a question ? a: | ? a| = Q _ alt(a)

According to 38, the meaning of a question is the set of propositions formed by replacing the wh-elements of the question with all possible entities included in the context. So, the Q-alternatives of a yes/no question (? a) is the singleton set {|a|} since there are no wh-elements in it. Consequently, the QUD of a discourse is defined as the set of questions that are aimed to be addressed by the interlocutors. A declarative sentence is considered as felicitous in the context if it addresses one or more items of the current QUD. Based on the definition of QUD, I propose that the pragmatic interpretation of a clause a containing -guo taking an argument of an eventuality type P generally obeys the following principle: (39) When the final state e, if any, of an eventuality of type P, is a part of the QUD, then the use of -guo, i.e. guo(P), implicates the discontinuity of e at the reference time RT, i.e., t(e) < RT.

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The theory in 39 is compatible with Grice (1975)'s Maxims of Relevance and Quantity. If the final state of an eventuality is interesting and needs to be addressed by the interlocutors in a context, then using -guo, which semantically does not contain this information, implicates that the final state does not hold (assuming that the speaker is providing enough information). The advantage of the theory in 39 is that it predicts that an utterance with -guo can be interpreted differently in different contexts. This is compatible with what we have observed such as the examples discussed in Section 3.2. Now, let's test the theory 39 and see whether it can give the right prediction in interpreting the discontinuity effect of -guo sentences.

4.1. Predicting the discontinuity of -guo with QUD Let's return to the examples in 18 and 19, repeated in 40 and 41 respectively. In 40, it sets up a specific context for the utterance in 1, which subsequently cancels the discontinuity of 1. What the question 40a concerns is whether John has the experience of being in Beijing, which is the QUD of the context. On the other hand, the current state of John is not an interesting question that needs to be addressed in the context. According to 39, since the current state of John is not part of the QUD, the discontinuity does not hold, namely John could be either in Beijing or not at the speech time. Similarly, the context in 41 sets up a QUD which only concerns whether John has the experience of breaking the computer, and the current state of the computer is not part of QUD. So, the discontinuity does not hold. (40) Context: John is in Beijing for the first time. The speaker B knows this fact, but A doesn’t. a. A: yuehan qu-guo beijing ma? A: John go.EXP Beijing MA A: ‘Has John been to Beijing?’ (QUD: {John has the experience of being in Beijing}) b. B: qu-guo, shishishang ta xianzai jiu zai beijing. B: go.EXP in_fact he now right at Beijing B: ‘Yes, in fact he is in Beijing right now.’ (Discontinuity doesn’t hold.) (41) Context: There is a computer in the context: Computer A (referred to as ‘this computer’) is broken by John and has NOT been fixed yet. a. A: yuehan youmeiyou nonghuai-guo zhe bu diannao? A: John have_not_have break.EXP this CL computer A: ‘Did John once break his computer?’ (QUD: {John has the experience of breaking this computer}) meiyou xiuhao. b. B: nonghuai-guo, shishishang xianzai hai B: break.EXP in_fact now still not fixed B: ‘Yes, in fact it has not been fixed yet.’ (Discontinuity doesn’t hold.)

In a different case such as 42, the answer 42b clearly implies that the subject John is not in Beijing at the speech time. Here, the question clearly concerns the current state of John. According to 39, the discontinuity of the state holds. Similarly, if we set up a different QUD from 41, that the current state of the computer is a part of it as in 43a, then the discontinuity holds accordingly. (42) a. A: yuehan qu-le beijing ma A: John go.PERF Beijing MA A: ‘Has John gone to Beijing?’ (QUD: {John's current state is in Beijing}) b. B: ta qu-guo B: he go.EXP B: ‘He has been there.’ (Discontinuity holds: he is not in Beijing right now.)

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(43) a. A: yuehan nonghuai-le zhe bu diannao ma A: John break.PERF this CL computer MA A: ‘Is this computer broken by John?’ (QUD: {The computer is broken by John}) b. B: ta nonghuai-guo B: he break.EXP B: ‘He once did.’ (Discontinuity holds: the computer has been fixed.)

4.2. The non-repeatable predicates As shown in Section 3, the sentences in 15 that are considered unacceptable are due to their pragmatic infelicity rather than the semantic ill-formedness. In a possible world, e.g. a video game, where a person can become young from being old and become alive after death by magic, these sentences will be well acceptable, as shown in 44. On the other hand, it is also true that the discontinuity still holds. So, the context in 44 does is to describe a world where the use of the -guo sentence is felicitous, while its meaning remains the same. (44) Context: In a video game, where a person can become young from being old and become alive after death by magic. a. yuehan si-guo. John die.EXP ‘John has died.’ (Discontinuity holds: he is alive now.) b. yuehan shasi-guo mali. John kill.EXP Mary ‘John once killed Mary.’ (Discontinuity holds: Mary is alive now.) c. ni ye lao-guo. you also old.EXP ‘You were once old.’ (Discontinuity holds: you are not old now.) Similar to previous examples such as 18 and 19, we can also set up a context to cancel the discontinuity for such nonrepeatable predicates such as si ‘die’. For example, the context in 45 sets up a QUD whether John has the experience of being dead regardless of his current state. Since, the current state is not a part of the QUD, according to 39, the discontinuity does not hold. Thus, sentence 45b is acceptable. Similarly, we can also set up proper context to cancel the discontinuity of sentences 44b and 44c. (45) Context: In a video game, where a person can become young from being old and become alive after death by magic. John is dead at the speech time. a. A: yuehan si-guo ma? A: John die.EXP MA A: ‘Has John once died.’ (QUD: {John has the experience of being dead}) b. B: yuehan si-guo, xianzai hai mei huo ne. B: John die.EXP now still not alive NE B: ‘Yes, and he is still dead now.’ (Discontinuity doesn’t hold.) In real world, it is true that some QUD is rarely possible. For example, the QUD in 45a is odd in the real world since once a person is dead, he does not exist and so that he cannot experience anything anymore. This means that it is hard to find a situation where the QUD can apply. Consequently, the sentence 44a can hardly be used in any situation in the real world. However, for 44b, we can set up a QUD that only concerns the experience of the subject, John, and the current state of the victim as not being interesting so that the discontinuity can disappear. An example is shown in 46, where the QUD only concerns the bad things that John has done. In this case, all the sub -guo sentences in 46b are instances of the bad things that John did, namely the current states of the other participants of the example events are not a part of the QUD. So, the

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discontinuity does not hold in 46b according to 39. Similarly, the non-repeatable predicate shao hui kaer de fangzi ‘burn down Karl's house’ with -guo does not imply that the burnt house has been repaired as well. (46) a. yuehan zuo-guo henduo huaishi John do.EXP many bad_things ‘John did many bad things.’ (QUD: {John has the experience of doing the bad thing x: x refers to all possible bad things}) b. ta qiang-guo yinhang, shaohui-guo kaer de fangzi, hai shasi-guo mali de fumu he rob.EXP bank burn.EXP Karl DE house and kill.EXP Mary DE parents ‘He robbed a bank, burned Karl's house, and killed Mary's parents.’ (Discontinuity doesn’t hold: Mary's parents are still dead.) For the example 8 with the same predicate sha si ‘kill’, the causal relation triggers a specific QUD that Qin Shihuang did bad things to the person, who thus holds hatred towards Qin Shihuang. In other words, the sentence can somehow be generalized as 47 without changing the main point that the writer wants to express. In this case, the QUD does not specifically concern the current state of the person's grandfather, thus the discontinuity does not hold. More precisely, whether the person's grandfather is alive or not does not matter in the original context, although our world knowledge tells us that he cannot be alive.

(47) Context: Experts are inspecting the facilities in a computer lab. a. women zheli you henduo diannao we here have many computer ‘We have many computers here.’ b. qizhong, yi bu diannao bei yuehan nonghuai-guo. among_them one CL computer PASS John break.EXP ‘Among them, one was once broken by John.’ (Discontinuity holds: it has been fixed.) c. qizhong, yuehan nonghuai-guo yi bu diannao among_them John break.EXP one CL computer ‘Among them, John once broke one.’ (Discontinuity holds: it has been fixed.)

4.3. The definite and indefinite objects The contrast between definite and indefinite objects in terms of discontinuity is not a problem anymore since the discontinuity of the -guo sentence with a definite object as in 5a can disappear in a specific context as shown in 19. An indefinite object is usually background information and can hardly be the focus of a sentence. So, it is hard to setup a QUD where the current state of an indefinite object is a part of it. However, in some special cases, it is indeed possible to do so. For example, the context in 48 specifies that the current states of the computers in the lab are part of the QUD. Thus, theory 39 predicts that the discontinuity in 48b or 48c holds. (48) yin dangnian qinshihuang zuo-guo shanghai ta de shi, yinci xin zhong huai hen. because that_year Qin_Shihuang do.EXP hurt him DE things therefore heart inside bear hatred ‘Because Qin Shihuang once did very bad things to him, he still bears hatred to him in his mind.’

4.4. A note on standalone -guo sentences We can see that theory 39 can accurately predict the discontinuity effect of -guo sentences given a specific context. Using the theory, we can also deliberately setup a context to manipulate the discontinuity effect as desired. For sentences without context, to explain why some sentences show discontinuity while others do not is tricky. Roberts (1996), following Stalnaker (1973), suggests that the QUD by default is simply the big question: what is the way things are? So, for 1, the salient QUD is something like: what are the facts about John? So, the current state of John is part of the QUD, which according to 39 predicts that the discontinuity implicature holds.

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Assuming the big question as the QUD, however, cannot explain why discontinuity does not hold in some -guo sentences, e.g. examples from 7 to 9. Taking one more step from Roberts (1996), I tentatively suggest that a specific context can be associated with a particular QUD that is a subset of the big question, i.e. a set of propositions that are assumed to be interesting and whose truth values need to be addressed. On the other hand, a sentence can trigger a potential context where this sentence is frequently used. Such context is then associated with a particular QUD, which I shall call Salient QUD. For example, talking about one's marriage as in 9 could be interesting in different contexts. There are several typical ones. One is the context where we talk about someone's previous experience in marriage, in which case, the QUD is whether he has the experience of being divorced or not. The other is the context where a matchmaker is trying to introduce the background of someone when introducing him/her to others. In this case, the current state is certainly interesting. Within the two different contexts, the same sentence will have two opposite interpretations. It happens that sentences like 9 can be used in both contexts and neither is more salient than the other. Negative sentences with -guo, such as the ones in 6, naturally set up a QUD that only concerns the experience, namely the existence of events, regardless of the current state. So, the discontinuity does not hold in negative contexts. For example, we could not say that young people do not have the experience of being young because they have not been old yet, nor could we say that people born in Beijing do not have the experience of being in Beijing because they have not left Beijing yet. 4.5. An interim summary In this section, I explain the discontinuity effect of -guo using the notion of QUD. A pragmatic principle 39 is given and tested with various examples including those used in previous studies and new ones. We can see that theory 39 can accurately predict when the discontinuity holds given an explicit QUD. We can also use theory 39 to deliberately setup a context so that the discontinuity effect of a sentence can be changed as we want. Finally, I suggest the notion of Salient QUD to explain the standalone sentences. However, we should note that theory 39 applies only when QUD is given, namely it is only used to predict the discontinuity effect of -guo sentences. On the other hand, it is not used to predict the QUD given a standalone sentence. In a pragmatic view, sentences should be discussed in use rather than standing alone. However, the notion of salient QUD here is to try to make an inference given a -guo sentence. For example, we can formulize the salient QUD as the one that has the highest probability, i.e. P(QUD|Sentence). The idea of Salient QUD, however, is rather immature and needs further evidence and experiments to be supported. 5. Conclusion In this article, I discuss the Chinese experiential marker -guo from both semantic and pragmatic points of view. Firstly, I show that the semantics accounts of the discontinuity property of -guo in previous studies are inaccurate, as the discontinuity property can be cancelled under certain contexts. I propose that the core semantics of -guo is an existential quantifier over eventualities in a specified TF, with a presupposition that the TF is before the RT. Consequently, I show that the so-called perfective -guo is a special case of experiential -guo and can be explained in the same framework with the notion of TF. After that, I analyze the discontinuity property from a pragmatic perspective with the notion of QUD and suggest that the discontinuity holds when the final state of the eventuality, if any, is part of the QUD. With context taken into account, the pragmatic principle described in 39 can effectively predict the interpretation of -guo sentences, and by explicitly changing the context, we can change the interpretations of such sentences. Similarly, some unacceptable sentences can become acceptable if we set up a proper context. Thus, I believe that the analysis of the discontinuity of -guo using the framework of QUDs is on the right track. For the standalone sentences, I suggest that there is a salient QUD associated with them, and that this salient QUD can explain the interpretation of the discontinuity effect. Again, my proposal of using the salient QUD for analyzing standalone sentences is immature. More evidence is needed to support this. Nonetheless, the main contribution of this article is to tease apart the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause the discontinuity effect of -guo. In terms of the relation between this article and the previous theories, the proposal in this paper is consistent with Yeh (1996)'s analysis that -guo is an existential quantifier and creates a sub discourse which is not directly accessible to adjacent sentences. However, Yeh's analysis treats repeatability as a semantic component of -guo under the Plurality Condition of Quantification rule. This paper explains the discontinuity effect of -guo from a pragmatic perspective. Pan and Lee (2004) also provide a pragmatic account. However, the details are significantly different. As I show above, their theory still assumes only one interpretation for a single -guo sentence. Based on the examples discussed in this paper, we can see that this assumption is rather problematic. On the contrary, the proposal in this paper covers the use of -guo in all

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different contexts. By introducing the role the context plays in terms of the discontinuity effect, it also allows for different interpretations of the same -guo sentence in different contexts. The semantics part of -guo I propose is similar to Lin (2006) except that Istage is not used. I show that the so-called partial reality problem is due to the telicity interpretation of the predicates expressed by the VO constructions and can thus be disassociated from the semantics of -guo. Lin (2006, 2007) takes repeatability as a presupposition, while my proposal treats the discontinuity as a conversational implicature triggered by context. In summary, I suggest that the study of semantics should take context into account, as this is consistent with the fact that the same sentence can have multiple interpretations in different contexts. To make observations of the same sentence in different contexts can help us to tease apart the semantic components which do not change across contexts and the pragmatic ones, e.g. implicatures, that might change across contexts. This paper takes this as a basis to study the Chinese experiential aspect expressed by -guo and shows that the new proposal gives much better prediction of its interpretation in different uses. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. References Chao, Y.R., 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley. Chen, G.T., 1979. The aspect markers Le, Guo, and Zhe in Mandarin Chinese. J. Chin. Lang. Teach. Assoc. 14, 27--46. Chen, J., 2018. He killed a chicken, but it didn’t die. Chin. Lang. Discourse 9, 136--161. De Swart, H., 1991. Adverbs of Quantification: A Generalized Quantifier Approach, vol. 1. Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen. Dowty, D., 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67, 547--619. Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic Convers. 4, 1--58. Huang, L.M.J., Davis, P.W., 1989. An aspectual system in mandarin chinese. J. Chin. Linguist. 17, 128--166. Iljic, R., 1990. The verbal suffix-guo in mandarin Chinese and the notion of recurrence. Lingua 81, 301--326. Jackendoff, R., 1991. Parts and boundaries. Cognition 41, 9--45. Klein, W., 1994. Time in Language. Routledge, London. Klein, W., Li, P., Hendriks, H., 2000. Aspect and assertion in mandarin Chinese. Nat. Lang. Linguist. Theory 18, 723--770. Krifka, M., 1989. Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution. In: 3rd European Summer School in Language, Logic and Information, . Li, C.N., Thompson, S.A., 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. University of California Press, Berkeley. Lin, J.W., 2006. Time in a language without tense: the case of Chinese. J. Semant. 23, 1--53. Lin, J.W., 2007. Predicate restriction, discontinuity property and the meaning of the perfective marker Guo in Mandarin Chinese. J. East Asian Linguist. 16, 237--257. Ma, J.h.S., 1977. Some aspects of the teaching of guo and le. J. Chin. Lang. Teach. Assoc. 12, 14--26. Mangione, L., Li, D., 1993. A compositional analysis of -guo and -le. J. Chin. Linguist. 65--122. Moens, M., 1987. Tense, Aspect and Temporal Reference. Pan, H., Lee, P., 2004. The role of pragmatics in interpreting the chinese perfective markers -guo and -le. J. Pragmat. 36, 441--466. Roberts, C., 1996. Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics. Searle, J.R., 1985. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press. Smith, C.S., 1997. The Parameter of Aspect, 2nd ed. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Stalnaker, R., 1973. Presuppositions. J. Philos. Logic 2, 447--457. Sybesma, R., 1997. Why chinese verb-le is a resultative predicate. J. East Asian Linguist. 6, 215--261. Tai, J.H., 1984. Verbs and times in Chinese: vendlers four categories. Parasession Lex. Semant. 20, 289--296. Tenny, C.L., 1987. Grammaticalizing Aspect and Affectedness. Ph.D. Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tenny, C.L., 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface, vol. 52. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Vendler, Z., 1957. Verbs and times. Philos. Rev. 66, 143--160. Wu, J.S., 2008. Terminability, wholeness and semantics of experiential guo. J. East Asian Linguist. 17, 1--32. Xu, H., 2015. The Chinese aspectual system. In: Doctoral dissertation. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Yeh, M., 1996. An analysis of the experiential guoEXP in mandarin: a temporal quantifier. J. East Asian Linguist. 5, 151--182.