[Corpora-List] New book

[Mcenery, Tony]

Dear All,

Slightly vulgar to advertise in this way, but I thought some of you may
be interested in a new book which Richard Xiao and I have written,
published by John Benjamins. Details below. Best,

Tony

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study
 
URL http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=SLCS%2073

    
Abstract
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the
development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured
exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to
express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first
corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation
aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to
achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to
linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both
the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level
model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and
sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional
nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and
four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This
exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated
misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the
literature.