Expressing Temporal Reference in Mandarin: A Quantitative Study Using Translation Corpora

This paper offers a quantitative study of temporal reference in Mandarin using three translation corpora (French–Mandarin, Mandarin–French and English–Mandarin). We have systematically examined a series of overt linguistic factors (such as perfective and imperfective grammaticalized particles, temporal adverbs and adverbials) and non-linguistic factors (such as lexical aspect and the Bounded Event Constraint, the latter argued to be a universal pragmatic principle) which current research suggests are responsible for expressing temporal reference in Mandarin. We used methods from the field of corpus linguistics, such as translational spotting, data coding (when no metalinguistic judgement is necessary) and data annotation (when a metalinguistic judgement is required). Our quantitative analyses indicate that, contrary to what is predicted by non-empirical studies, aspectual particles are infrequent and their role in expressing temporal reference is questionable. In contrast, temporal adverbs and adverbials play a significant role in expressing reference to past and future time, whereas linguistically non-marked situations are most frequently located in the present. In accordance with the Bounded Event Constraint, the lexical aspect of situations is central to the determination of temporal reference: events are largely located in the past, and states in the present. These results are interpreted in a relevance-theoretic model of temporal reference, according to which hearers treat temporal information coming from various cues in a cognitively coherent manner. A series of differences has been found regarding the role of the factors examined for Mandarin as a source and as a target language, partially supporting the assumption of translation universals.