Inner and outer aspect in Cantonese

Abstract

Aspect is a core part of Chinese verbal expressions. This analysis covers the main types of aspect for Cantonese (inner/situation and outer/viewpoint), modeling their semantics and constraining their combinations. Outer aspectual particles are treated as verbal markers that combine with their head using the head marker rule and constrain its aspect. They must combine with a verb that is a lexeme, not a phrase. Inner aspectual particles also combine with lexemes, but differ from outer aspectual particles in that they introduce a one-place predicate. This behavior is similar to resultative verbs. We therefore treat inner aspectual particles as defective resultative verbs with three special properties: (i) one subclass (event) takes the predicate of the first verb as an argument, the other subclass (individual) takes the ARG1 or ARG2 of the head verb. (ii) Both types constrain the (viewpoint) aspect of the head verb to be perfective or experiential. This also ensures that once the inner aspect is added, it is only compatible with a subset of outer aspectual particles (e.g., not progressive, continuous or delimitative). (iii) The inner aspectual particles cannot be main verbs. The analysis is implemented in an open-source Cantonese HPSG, available at .