Incompleteness and (not-)at-issue Updates in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper re-examines the ongoing debate on whether overt aspect marking is required for expressing episodic readings in Mandarin Chinese [22, 28, 30, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53]. I establish the generalization that overt aspect marking can be optional when the information concerning the occurrence of the event is NOT at-issue in the discourse, which is supported by both the new data on clause-embedding predicates and the existing observations in [37, 45, 46, 50]. In addition, I show that zero-marked sentences in Mandarin are imperfective sentences which do not entail but are compatible with episodic interpretations. A formal pragmatic account is proposed to capture the discourse-sensitivity of such a requirement, making use of the unidimensional incremental dynamic theory of meaning in [2, 3] and the Gricean theory of implicatures [5, 19, 27, 42].