Situation Type, Context Coercion and the Meanings of the Chinese Aspect Marker Le

336 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.Three experiments were conducted to obtain empirical evidence for the situation approach: an off-line sentence interpretation test, an off-line sentence naturalness judgment test, and an on-line experiment which used the moving window paradigm to investigate the processing of le in situation-concordant sentences (aspectually transparent, with no situation shift) and situation-coerced sentences (through context coercion). The results of the three experiments support the situation approach. Strong correlations were noted between le' s meanings and situation type: native speakers of Chinese interpreted le as perfective when it occurred in dynamic situations, and as inchoative when it appeared in stative situations. However, situations and le's meaning could be coerced through context coercion. Additionally, context-coerced sentences were processed in real time more slowly than concord constructions.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD