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Corpus Based Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese
1st Edition Tony Mcenery Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao
ISBN(s): 9780415992459, 0415992451
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.38 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
Corpus-Based Contrastive
Studies of English and
Chinese
Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics
EDITED BY TONY MCENERY, Lancaster University UK
MICHAEL HOEY, Liverpool University, UK
1. Swearing in English 8. Public Discourses of Gay Men

Bad Language, Purity and Power Paul Baker
from 1586 to the Present
Tony McEnery 9. Semantic Prosody
A Critical Evaluation
2. Antonymy Dominic Stewart
A Corpus-Based Perspective
Steven Jones 10. Corpus Assisted Discourse
Studies on the Iraq Conflict
3. Modelling Variation in Spoken Wording the War
and Written English Edited by John Morley and Paul Bayley
David Y. W. Lee
11. Corpus-Based Contrastive
4. The Linguistics of Studies of English and Chinese
Political Argument Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery
The Spin-Doctor and the Wolf-Pack
at the White House
Alan Partington
5. Corpus Stylistics
Speech, Writing and Thought
Presentation in a Corpus of
English Writing
Elena Semino and Mick Short
6. Discourse Markers
Across Languages
A Contrastive Study of Second-Level
Discourse Markers in Native and
Non-Native Text with Implications for
General and Pedagogic Lexicography
Dirk Siepmann
7. Grammaticalization and English

Complex Prepositions
A Corpus-Based Study
Sebastian Hoffman
Corpus-Based Contrastive
Studies of English and
Chinese
Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery
New York London

First published 2010
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Taylor & Francis

The right of Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf-
ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-

marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McEnery,Tony, 1964–
Corpus-based contrastive studies of English and Chinese / by Richard Xiao and Tony
McEnery.
p. cm. — (Routledge advances in corpus linguistics; 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Contrastive linguistics. 2. Semantics, Comparative. 3. Chinese language--
Aspect. 4. English language—Aspect. I. Xiao, Richard. II. Title.
P134.M34 2010
425—dc22
2010000745
ISBN 0-203-84795-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN13: 978-0-415-99245-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-84795-4 (ebk)
Contents
List of Tables vii

List of Figures ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction 1
2 Aspect Marking in English and Chinese 11
3 Temporal Adverbials and Telicity in English and Chinese 24
4 Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese 41
5 Passives in English and Chinese 74
6 Negation in English and Chinese: Variants and Variations 110
7 Negation in English and Chinese: Special Usages 147
8 Challenge and Promise, and the Way Forward 171
Notes 179
Bibliography 187
Index 197
Tables
1.1 Genres Covered in FLOB, Frown and LCMC 9
2.1 Combined Aspect/Tense Markers in English 12
2.2 Distribution of Aspect Markers in LCMC 13
2.3 Distribution of Aspect Markers in FLOB 14
2.4 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Frown 15
2.5 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Narrative and

Expository Texts 16
2.6 Contrasting the Distribution of Aspect Markers 18
3.1 Distribution of for-adverbials Across Usage Categories 26
3.2 Distribution of in-adverbials Across Usage Categories 28
3.3 Distribution of Pre-Verbal Time Expressions Across Usage

Categories 34
3.4 Distribution of Post-Verbal Time Expressions Across Usage

Categories 34
4.1 Eight Categories of Classifiers in Chinese 48
4.2 Common Classifiers in English 60
5.1 Frequencies of be and get Passives in FLOB and BNCdemo 75
5.2 Long vs. Short Passives in FLOB and BNCdemo 76
5.3 Semantic Properties of be and get Passives in FLOB and

BNCdemo 79
5.4 Distribution of be/get Passives (per 100k words) 83

viii Tables
5.5 Syntactic Functions of English Passives 86
5.6 Long and Short Passives in LCMC and CallHome 91
5.7 Syntactic Functions of Passive Constructions in Chinese 95
5.8 Interaction Between Passives and Aspect 96
5.9 A Breakdown of Syntactic Functions and Aspect Markers

in bei Passives 97
5.10 Chinese Passive Markers Across Meaning Categories 98
5.11 Normalized Frequencies of Chinese Passive Markers

(per 100K words) 100
6.1 Normalized Frequencies and Proportions of Negative

Forms in English 111
6.2 Usage Categories of anybody, anyone, and anything 118
6.3 Subject-Operator Inversions in FLOB and BNCdemo 122
6.4 Proposals of Major Distinctions Between bu and mei 126
6.5 Negative Affi xes in English and Chinese 142

Figures
2.1 Viewpoint aspects in English. 12
2.2 Distribution of aspect markers (frequency). 17
2.3 Distribution of aspect markers (%). 18
2.4 Distribution of perfective aspect markers. 19
2.5 Distribution of the perfect in FLOB/Frown. 20
2.6 Distribution of imperfective aspect markers. 21
2.7 Distribution of imperfective markers in FLOB/Frown. 22
3.1 For-adverbials in FLOB and BNCdemo. 27
3.2 In-adverbials in FLOB and BNCdemo. 28
3.3 Distribution of in-adverbials across usage categories. 30
4.1 Normalized frequencies of classifiers in Chinese. 48
4.2 Distribution of Chinese classifiers across genres. 49
4.3 Proportions of different types of Chinese classifiers

in each genre. 49
4.4 Normalized frequencies of classifiers in English. 59
4.5 Distribution of classifiers across genres in English. 62
4.6 Proportions of different types of classifiers in English. 63
4.7 Proportions of eight categories of classifiers in terms

of tokens. 64
4.8 Numbers of eight categories of classifiers in terms of types. 65

x Figures
4.9 Proportions of classifiers across genres. 66
5.1 Long vs. short passives in written and spoken English. 77
5.2 Long vs. short be/get passives. 77
5.3 Passives with/without an adverbial in FLOB and

BNCdemo. 78
5.4 Be/get unemployed/fired/sacked in BNCdemo. 81
5.5 Distribution of be/get passives across genres. 84
5.6 Distribution of long vs. short be passives across genres. 85
5.7 Proportions of pragmatically negative be passives

in 16 genres. 85
5.8 Overall distribution of passive markers. 101
5.9 Distribution of syntactic passives. 102
5.10 Distribution of long vs. short passives. 103
5.11 Proportions of negative bei passives. 104
5.12 Syntactic functions of bei constructions. 104
6.1 Normalized frequencies of negation categories. 112
6.2 Full and contracted forms. 113
6.3 Bu and mei/meiyou in LCMC. 133
6.4 Bu and mei/meiyou in CallHome. 133
6.5 Distribution of negative adverbs across 16 genres. 134
6.6 Distribution of the not- and no-negation. 144
6.7 Distribution of the bu- and mei/meiyou-negation. 144
8.1 A model of Contrastive Corpus Linguistics. 176

Abbreviations
AmE American English
ASP aspect marker
BA ba, marker for preposed object
BNC British National Corpus
BNCdemo Demographically sampled component of the BNC
BrE British English
Brown The Brown University Corpus of Present-day

American English
CallHome CallHome Mandarin Transcripts Corpus
CANCODE Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in

English
CL classifier
COS change-of-state le ( )
DE structural particles de ( , , )
FLOB Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English
Frown Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English
INT passive intensifier gei ( ), suo ( )
LCMC Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese
LDC Linguistic Data Consortium
LL log-likelihood test
xii Abbreviations
LLSCC Lancaster Los Angeles Spoken Chinese Corpus
LOB Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English
Pl Plural suffi x men ( )
PRT particle
PSV syntactic passive marker
RVC resultative verb complement

Acknowledgements
This book presents the major outputs of research which we have under-
taken over past years on our projects “Contrasting Tense and Aspect in
English and Chinese” and “Contrasting English and Chinese”. Both proj-
ects were funded, under grants RES-000–220135 and RES-000–23–0553
respectively, by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), United
Kingdom, to which we are greatly indebted.
We are grateful to Erica Wetter, editor at Routledge, for her unfailing sup-
port while we worked on this book, without which the book would not have
been possible. We also thank Dr Jiajin Xu and Matthew Davies for reading
and commenting on our manuscript, which has improved the book greatly.
On a personal level, Richard Xiao would like to thank his co-author
and research collaborator, Tony McEnery, for his interest and enthusiasm
in researching a language distinctly different from his native language,
English, and for the many years of happy collaboration on their projects.
Richard’s thanks also go to his family, Lyn Zhang and Yina Xiao, for their
support and understanding when he could only spend very little time with
them while he was working on this book.
Tony McEnery would like to thank all of his colleagues, and in particu-
lar Richard Xiao, for the support they have provided to him while he has
served in several administrative roles. Without such support it would sim-
ply not have been possible to continue to undertake research such as this.
Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery
December 2009
1 Introduction
English and Chinese are two widely spoken world languages that differ
genetically. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differ-
ences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with
typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and
Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The promise relates to the dif-
ference—by studying such language pairs in contrast, we can gain a bet-
ter appreciation of the scale of variability in the human language system.
The challenge arises from that promise—theories and observations based
on closely related language pairs can give rise to conclusions which seem
certain but which, when studied in the context of a language pair such as
English and Chinese, become not merely problematized afresh, but signifi-
cantly more challenging to resolve. This book is about this promise and
this challenge.
In the chapters that follow, we will explore a series of features in con-
trast between English and Chinese. In each case the result is a challenge to
our understanding of language followed by a reworking and expansion of
that understanding. The features that we focus upon, which provide the
main theme of this book, relate to the cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-
related grammatical categories, i.e. grammatical categories that contribute
to aspectual meaning—both ‘situation aspect’ (i.e. inherent temporal prop-
erties of a situation) at the semantic level and ‘viewpoint aspect’ (i.e. the
temporal perspective from which a situation is presented) at the grammati-
cal level—in English and Chinese.
The marriage of aspect research and cross-linguistic contrast is, we
would argue, an entirely natural one. On the one hand, research on aspect
usually has a contrastive focus, as demonstrated by the works by Comrie
(1976), Dahl (1985, 1999), Bybee et al. (1994), Smith (1997), and Miller
(1999). On the other hand, a contrastive study should also have an aspec-
tual focus as aspect is an important grammatical category. In Brown and
Miller (1999), for example, aspect takes up the lion’s share of the work
presented. While some languages may not have tense (e.g. Chinese), aspect
appears to have been found in all human languages investigated so far (cf.
Dahl 1985).
2 Corpus-Based Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese
Nevertheless, while aspect is a common grammatical category (cf. Miller
1999: 42), languages may express aspectual meanings in different ways (cf.
Lehmann 1999: 48). For example, English uses morphologically combined
tense/aspect markers whereas Chinese uses aspect markers (a type of gram-
matical words) to express aspectual meaning (see Chapter 2). Yet subtle
distinctions occur: while English and Chinese both have certain gram-
matical aspects (e.g. the progressive), they differ in their use of that shared
aspect. Differences such as these are useful in accounting for the phenom-
ena observed in attested language use, as will be shown in this book.
In spite of its focus on aspect, this book is not restricted to the gram-
matical category of aspect. Rather, it seeks to provide a systematic and
contrastive account of aspect-related grammatical categories in English and
Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpus data of the two lan-
guages. So while our focus is upon aspect, the discussion of it will lead us
to consider a wider range of grammatical features.
1.1 OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
Aspect is compositional in nature. Aspectual meaning is the composite

result of situation aspect and viewpoint aspect (Smith 1997) while situation
aspect per se is compositional in that it is a synthetic result of the interac-
tion between verb classes and arguments, adjuncts and viewpoint aspect at
nucleus, core, and clause levels (Xiao and McEnery 2004a). In this “dou-
ble” composition process, a variety of grammatical categories are involved,
some of which are language independent while others are language specific
(see Xiao and McEnery 2004b).
The intrinsic semantic features of verbs, which have been a focus of
aspect research since Vendler (1967), play a major role in determining the
aspectual meaning of a sentence. It is important to note that at the lexical
level, resultative verb complements (RVCs) typically express a telic notion
and add the concept of a goal or an endpoint to durative situations which
would otherwise be atelic.1 With telic verbs, internal arguments become
relevant at the core level of composition because quantified noun phrases
behave differently from those that do not take a quantifier (Xiao and
McEnery 2004b). In this sense, quantifying constructions (see Chapter 4)
contribute powerfully to aspectual meaning. Our research, as presented in
this book, reveals a number of grammatical categories that contribute to
aspectual meaning at the clause level. They include, for example, aspect
markers, temporal adverbials, quantifiers, passives, and negation, in addi-
tion to a number of language-specific structures in English and Chinese.
The relationship of these grammatical categories to aspect will be explored
in this book.
Following this Introduction, Chapter 2 explores aspect marking, which
contributes directly to aspectual meaning. Our contrastive study of aspect
Introduction 3
marking in English and Chinese shows that while Chinese and English are
typologically different, aspect markers in the two languages show a strik-
ingly similar distribution pattern, especially across the two broad catego-
ries of narrative and expository texts. It is also interesting to note that while
British English and American English have developed variations in spelling,
word choice, and grammar, their use of aspect is strikingly similar—the
distribution of aspect markers across our corpora of British and American
English (see section 1.3 for descriptions of the data used in this book) is
almost identical.
As will be shown in Chapter 3, by temporal adverbials, we mean comple-
tive and durative adverbials which have been used as diagnostic tests for
determining the telicity value of a situation. They roughly correspond to in-
and for-adverbials respectively in English and to pre-verbal and post-verbal
temporal expressions in Chinese. In both languages there are a number
of usage categories for both types of temporal expressions, which show a
high level of similarity, in spite of some obvious differences. The distinction
between in- and for-adverbials in English is principally mirrored by the dif-
ferent positions of time expressions in Chinese. In contrast, position does
not appear to play such an important role in English, where the majority
of both in- and for-adverbials occur in the post-verbal position (more than
95% for the former and above 80% for the latter, see Chapter 3). In terms
of functions, the major functions of in-adverbials in English and pre-verbal
time expressions in Chinese are to indicate period and scope/range. In both
English and Chinese, negation closely interacts with aspect and seriously
affects the reliability of completive and durative time expressions as tests
for telicity. When they appear in negation, about two thirds of the total
instances of English in-adverbials express a scope meaning, which is irrel-
evant to telicity, whilst in Chinese, negation accounts for three quarters of
the total instances of pre-verbal time expressions indicating duration. Of
the various usage categories established for time expressions in English,
only in-adverbials that express a period meaning and for-adverbials that
express a duration meaning are relevant to telicity tests. Similarly, of the
various usage categories established for time expressions in Chinese, only
those indicating a period meaning (typically, but not always, preceding the
verb) and the post-verbal time expressions indicating duration are relevant
to telicity tests.
Chapter 4 will show that Chinese employs numeral-classifier construc-
tions obligatorily in quantification whereas in English a classifier is only
required when noncount nouns are quantified. This cross-linguistic differ-
ence exists simply because Chinese is a non-inflectional language whereas
nouns in English inflect for plurality morphologically. All of the eight
semantic categories of classifiers exist in both Chinese and English, but
classifiers in the two languages differ in a number of ways (see Chapter
4 for details). For example, classifiers are significantly more common in
Chinese; unit classifiers and verbal classifiers are characteristic of Chinese
whereas collective classifiers are more diversified in English; classifiers in
English and Chinese display some language-specific syntactic differences;
there are also some slight differences in the distribution of various catego-
ries of classifiers across genres in the two languages. Nevertheless, these
differences are largely quantitative rather than qualitative. Classifiers are
motivated cognitively, pragmatically, and conventionally in both English
and Chinese. In other words, even though Chinese is recognized as a classi-
fier language while English is not, the two languages show striking similari-
ties in their classifier systems in spite of the different terms used and some
quantitative differences.
Chapter 5 is concerned with passive constructions in English and Chi-
nese. Passives always denote delimited situations with the implication of the
successful achievement of a result probably because of the so-called “affect-
edness constraint” on the passive, i.e. the subject must be affected, which
explains why an utterance such as *Angela is resembled by Mary is unac-
ceptable. In this sense, passives have a function similar to that of RVCs.
Our study indicates that while passive constructions in English and Chi-
nese express a basic passive meaning, they also show a range of differences
in terms of overall frequencies, syntactic features and functions, seman-
tic properties, and distributions across genres (see Chapter 5 for details of
the brief summary that follows). For example, passive constructions are
nearly ten times as frequent in English as in Chinese. A number of reasons
can be forwarded which help to account for this contrast between English
and Chinese. Firstly, the unmarked be passives can be used for both static
and dynamic situations while Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic
events. Secondly, Chinese passives typically have a negative ‘semantic pros-
ody’ (i.e. negative pragmatic meaning) while English passives (especially be
passives) do not. Finally, English is “addicted to the passive voice” (Baker
1985: 121; cf. also Quirk 1968: 170), especially in formal writing, whereas
Chinese tends to avoid syntactic passives wherever possible. Short passives
(i.e. those without an explicit agent) typically account for over 90% of
total occurrences of passives in both written and spoken English, a pro-
portion significantly higher than that in Chinese, where long passives are
the statistical norm, because historically an agent must normally be spelt
out in passive constructions in Chinese, though this constraint has become
more relaxed nowadays under the influence of English. A major distinction
between passive constructions in the two languages is that Chinese passives
are more frequently used with an inflictive meaning than English passives.
This is probably due to the fact Chinese passives were used at early stages
primarily for unpleasant or undesirable events. There are clearly genre vari-
ations in the distribution of passive variants in both languages. Passives
in English occur more frequently in informative than imaginative genres.
Reports/official documents and academic prose, in particular, show very
high proportions of passives. In contrast, these two genres have the low-
est proportions of passives in Chinese, where mystery/detective fiction and
Introduction 5
religious writing show exceptionally high proportions of passives. These
differences are closely associated with the origins and functions of passive
constructions in the two languages. The passive is primarily used to mark
an impersonal, objective and formal style in English whereas it is typically
an “inflictive voice” in Chinese.
As will be shown in detail in Chapter 6, negation may influence aspec-
tual meaning in both English and Chinese because it can coerce a dynamic
situation into a stative situation. For example, in We talked for a while,
the dynamic event of talking is taken in the time frame for a while; in con-
trast, in We didn’t talk for a while, a stative situation (i.e. the state with
no talking going on) is taken in the frame. Our research has uncovered
some important differences, as well as similarities, in negation in English
and Chinese. The two broad categories of explicit negation in English, not
vs. no-negation, are primarily stylistically oriented whereas the distinction
between the two broad types of explicit negation in Chinese, bu and mei-
negation, is aspectually motivated. In terms of distribution across written
and spoken registers, negation in English is 2.5 times as frequent in speech
as in writing. Our Chinese corpora show that negation is 2.8 times as fre-
quent in speech as in writing. In both English and Chinese, negation is gen-
erally more frequent in fiction, humour, and conversation whilst reports/
official documents and academic prose show the lowest frequency of all
types of negation. Negation in English and Chinese demonstrates some
language specific features. Negation in Chinese is closely allied with aspect.
On the one hand, mei/meiyou as an adverb negates the realization of a
situation while on the other hand bu and mei/meiyou are sensitive to the
aspectual feature of dynamicity. In contrast, negation in English (either not
or no-negation) does not appear to be sensitive to aspect marking or situa-
tion aspect features such as dynamicity. Nevertheless, negation in English
also has its own features that are not relevant or apparent in Chinese. For
example, (i) non-assertive forms typically follow the negator in a clause in
English, and (ii) the polarities of the statement and the tag in a tag question
in English are normally opposite.
The discussion in Chapter 6 of various negative forms and their lan-
guage specific features in English and Chinese provide a basis for further
cross-linguistic exploration of negation in the two languages in Chapter 7,
where the scope and focus of negation as well as special usages such as
transferred negation, double negation, and redundant negation in the two
languages are contrasted.
1.2 THE CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO CONTRASTIVE STUDIES
Contrastive research of English and Chinese has attracted great atten-

tion from the late 1970s onwards, particularly in mainland China. Many
authored and edited volumes that contrast English and Chinese have been
published in China over the past decades (e.g. Ren 1981, 1994; Zhang and
Chen 1981; Zhao 1981; Wu 1982; Xu 1985; Wan 1988; Yang and Li 1990;
Liu 1991; Lian 1993; Wang 1993; Fu and Yuan 1994; C. Liu 1994, 1998;
Yu 1994; Wang 1994; Li 1996; Pan 1997; Shao 1997; Xiong 1997; Xiao
1998; Zhao 1999; Xu 2002; Pan and Tan 2006; Xu and Zhang 2006),
but none of them is written in English and none of them, including those
published recently, has used corpus data. 2 Most of them are based on intu-
itions and confected examples while a few others have used translated data.
Given that language studies now typically require the use of corpora, the
existing books on contrastive studies of English and Chinese can uncontro-
versially be viewed as outmoded.
The predominance of intuitions in contrastive studies in China is pos-
sibly related to the guidelines established in China by Zhao (1979), stating
that contrastive study is concerned with langue rather than parole. The
consequence of these somewhat misleading guidelines is that, in some con-
trastive grammars, a growing gulf develops between an idealized form of
Chinese which is the basis of the work presented and the Chinese language
as it is used and experienced by speakers of modern Mandarin Chinese.
Using translated data for contrastive studies is also problematic because
of the nature of translations (further discussion to follow). Given the rapid
development of the corpus methodology since the 1990s, which has “rev-
olutionized” nearly all branches of linguistic investigation (see McEnery,
Xiao, and Tono 2006), it is somewhat surprising that corpus data has been
ignored to date in contrastive research undertaken on English and Chinese.
Nevertheless, this avoidance of corpora is also expected, given the confl ict
between Zhao’s guidelines and the nature of corpus data (i.e. performance
data, or parole), coupled with the difficulty involved in creating comparable
corpora that can provide a reliable basis for the comparison of the two
languages (cf. Chapter 8).
We decided to take a corpus-based approach to cross-linguistic con-
trast of English and Chinese for a number of reasons. While it is true
that using intuitions and invented examples can reveal some interesting
features of language use, intuitions are not always reliable, because the
intuitions of individual researchers can be influenced by their dialects or
sociolects, and also “because each of us has only a partial knowledge of
the language, we have prejudices and preferences, our memory is weak,
our imagination is powerful (so we can conceive of possible contexts for
the most implausible utterances)” (Krishnamurthy 2000: 32–33). Fur-
thermore, when one invents linguistic examples on the basis of intuitions
to support and disapprove an argument, one is actually monitoring one’s
language production. Consequently, even if one’s intuitions are correct,
such examples may not be typical of attested language use and the danger
is ever present that the example has been produced, whether consciously
or not, to support rather than challenge the theory in question. In contrast,
representative corpora pool together the productions of a large number
Introduction 7
of language users, thus avoiding the potential biases in the intuitions of
individual researchers (see McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006: 6–7; Xiao
2009a). An additional advantage of the corpus-based approach is that a
corpus can provide a reliable basis of quantification, which is unavailable
in the intuition-based approach. Hence, the corpus-based approach can
achieve more realistic and accurate descriptions of attested language use
(cf. McEnery and Xiao 2005a).
By the corpus-based approach, however, we do not mean that intu-
itions are totally rejected as some so-called “corpus-driven” linguists
have advocated (e.g. Tognini-Bonelli 2001). In our view, intuitions and
corpus data are two important types of evidence in linguistic theory. Lin-
guistic intuitions can be used via introspection to invent (grammatical,
ungrammatical, or questionable) example sentences for linguistic analy-
sis, or make judgments about the acceptability/grammaticality or mean-
ing of an expression. They are always useful in linguistics as the linguist
can in principle invent purer examples instantly for analysis. Intuitions
are even in a sense indispensable in linguistic theorizing because cat-
egorization, which usually involves intuitive judgments, is unavoidable
in theory building. Nevertheless, intuitions should be applied with cau-
tion for reasons which we have explored elsewhere (e.g. McEnery, Xiao,
and Tono 2006) and will not repeat here. Since both intuitions and cor-
pora have their own advantages as well as known weaknesses, it is our
view that the two should be combined so as to take advantage of their
strengths while circumventing their weaknesses. In spite of the philo-
sophical tension between theoretical linguists and corpus linguists, the
intuition-based approach and the corpus-based approach are not neces-
sarily antagonistic (Xiao 2009a). Rather the two approaches comple-
ment each other. The key to using corpus data is to fi nd the balance
between the use of corpus data and the use of one’s intuitions. Hence, in
this book, as we have advocated and practised elsewhere (e.g. Xiao and
McEnery 2004a; McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006), we have relied upon
a fusion of corpus evidence and intuitions. That is, while the principal
source of evidence that we use is attested language use, we do call on
native speaker intuitions where appropriate.
While corpora undoubtedly play an important role in achieving
improved grammatical descriptions, the results of corpus studies are only
as good as the corpora used. We noted earlier that some of the contras-
tive studies published in China are based on translated data. But can
corpora consisting of original texts and their translations (i.e. what we
would call ‘parallel corpora’ in McEnery and Xiao 2007a) provide a reli-
able basis for cross-linguistic contrast? According to James (1980: 178),
“translation equivalence is the best available basis of comparison.” Nev-
ertheless, this view has increasingly been challenged as a result of a range
of distinctive features of translated language which have been uncov-
ered in recent corpus-based translation studies that compare translated
texts with comparable target native language. For example, in relation to
native English/Chinese, translated English/Chinese has four core patterns
of lexical use: a relatively lower proportion of lexical words over func-
tion words, a relatively higher proportion of high-frequency words over
low-frequency words, a relatively greater repetition of the most frequent
words, and less variety in the words that are most frequently used (e.g.
Laviosa 1998a; Xiao 2010). Other studies show that translated language
is characterized, beyond the lexical level, by normalization, simplifica-
tion, explicitation, and sanitization (McEnery and Xiao 2007a; Xiao and
Yue 2009; Xiao, He, and Yue 2010). As these features are regular and
typical not only of translated English but also some other languages,
translated language is at best an unrepresentative special variant of the
target native language, or a “third code” different from both source and
target languages (Frawley 1984), which cannot serve alone as a reliable
basis for contrastive studies.
If parallel corpora are unreliable for cross-linguistic contrast, then what
kind of corpus data can be used for this purpose? Our answer is ‘compa-
rable corpora’, i.e. monolingual corpora of different native languages which
are created using the same sampling techniques and similar balance and
representativeness. Their comparability lies in their comparable sampling
techniques and similar balance.
1.3 THE CORPORA USED IN THIS BOOK
Having established that we will base our contrastive studies upon compa-
rable corpus resources, it is now appropriate to introduce the corpora used
in this book, which are composed of written and spoken data sampled from
English and Chinese.
The Freiburg-LOB corpus (i.e. FLOB) is an update of LOB (Lancaster-
Oslo-Bergen corpus of British English, see Johansson, Leech, and Good-
luck 1978) which sampled texts published in 1991–1992 (Hundt, Sand,
and Siemund 1998). A second corpus, the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin
Chinese (i.e. LCMC), was designed as a Chinese match for FLOB, repre-
senting written Chinese published in China in the early 1990s (McEnery,
Xiao, and Mo 2003). Both corpora consist of five hundred 2,000-word
samples taken proportionally from the same 15 genres in English and Chi-
nese, each totalling one million words. 3 The two balanced comparable
corpora have not only made it possible to compare English and Chinese in
general, they have also allowed us to reveal more fi ne-grained genre dis-
tinctions between the two languages. The genres covered in FLOB/LCMC
and their proportions are given in Table 1.1. Another corpus of the same
design, the Freiburg-Brown corpus (i.e. Frown, see Hundt et al. 1999),
which represents written American English in the early 1990s, is also used
in some parts of our research.
Introduction 9
Table 1.1 Genres Covered in FLOB, Frown and LCMC
Category Genre Samples Proportion (%)
A News reportage 44 8.8
B News editorials 27 5.4
C News reviews 17 3.4
D Religious writing 17 3.4
E Skills/trades/hobbies 38 7.6
F Popular lore 44 8.8
G Biographies and essays 77 15.4
H Reports/official documents 30 6
J Academic prose 80 16
K General fiction 29 5.8
L Mystery/detective fiction 24 4.8
M Science fiction 6 1.2
N Adventure fiction 29 5.8
P Romantic fiction 29 5.8
R Humour 9 1.8
Total 500 100
In addition to written corpus data, two spoken corpora of sampling periods

similar to that of FLOB/LCMC are used in this book to compare written
and spoken English/Chinese. We decided to use only typical spoken data,
i.e. dialogue, while excluding hybrid genres such as written-to-be-spoken
scripts or prepared speech. For English, we used the demographically sam-
pled component of the British National Corpus (the World Edition, here-
after referred to as BNCdemo), which contains approximately four million
words of conversational data sampled during 1985–1994 in the United
Kingdom (Aston and Burnard 1998).
For Chinese, the only spoken corpus available to us when the research
was undertaken was much smaller, the CallHome Mandarin Chinese Tran-
scripts released by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in 1996. The cor-
pus comprises a contiguous 5- to 10-minute segment taken from each of the
120 unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Manda-
rin Chinese, totalling approximately 300,000 word tokens. This corpus was
grammatically analyzed and marked up in XML as part of our work and
was later published as the CallHome Mandarin Chinese Transcripts—XML
Version (McEnery and Xiao 2008) by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
While it is true that telephone calls can differ from face-to-face conversa-
tions along some dimensions, its sampling period is roughly comparable.
Also, on an entirely practical and pragmatic note, a good reason for using
the CallHome corpus was that this dataset was closest to BNCdemo which
was available to us.
To guard against any problems produced by the use of the CallHome
data, at a later stage of our studies, we have also based our research on a
balanced corpus of spoken Mandarin, the Lancaster Los Angeles Spoken
Chinese Corpus (LLSCC), which we created in collaboration with UCLA.
The LLSCC corpus is composed of one million words of dialogues (55%)
and monologues (45%) in Mandarin. These represent both spontaneous
(57%) and scripted (43%) speech. Seven genres are covered in this corpus:
face-to-face conversation, telephone conversation, play/movie scripts, TV
talk show transcripts, transcripts of formal debates over various topics,
spontaneous oral narrative, and edited oral narrative.4
All of the corpora introduced here are annotated with word class infor-
mation, for both English and Chinese texts. They are encoded in Unicode
and marked up in extensible markup language (XML), a combination that
not only represents the current standard of corpus construction, but has
also allowed us to use the same XML-aware, Unicode-compliant corpus
exploration tool Xaira (see Xiao 2006a for a review) on all corpora to
ensure a high degree of comparability in data extraction. Xaira, as well
as Wordsmith (version 4.0, Scott 2003), are used throughout this book to
extract data from the corpora mentioned earlier.
As these corpora are of different sizes, the raw frequencies extracted
from them were normalized to a common basis, or the proportional data
for each corpus was used where appropriate for easy comparison.
Having introduced our methodology and data, we will explore, in the
chapters that follow, the major aspect-related grammatical categories in
2 Aspect Marking in English
and Chinese
In this chapter, we will contrast the distribution of aspect markers, which

contribute directly to aspectual meaning, in Chinese and British/American
English on the basis of three comparable native language corpora, namely,
LCMC for Chinese and FLOB/Frown for English.1 This will serve to set the
scene for the rest of the book where our focus will narrow to specific features
and their grammatical realization. Before proceeding to the contrast of aspect
marking in English and Chinese, however, a brief description of the aspect
markers in the two languages is appropriate.
2.1 ASPECT MARKING SYSTEMS IN ENGLISH AND CHINESE
Aspect consists of two components: situation aspect and viewpoint aspect.

Situation aspect refers to the aspectual information conveyed by the inherent
semantic representation of a verb or an idealized situation while viewpoint
aspect refers to the aspectual information reflected by the temporal perspec-
tive the speaker takes in presenting a situation. Aspectual meaning is the syn-
thetic result of the interaction between the two components (Smith 1997).
Situation aspect is also compositional in nature, which can be modelled as
verb classes at the lexical level and as situation types at the sentential level (see
Xiao and McEnery 2004b). Situation aspect is universal cross-linguistically
(cf. Xiao and McEnery 2002), because it is essentially a cognitive-semantic
concept while the basis for natural language semantics is “the conceptual sys-
tem that emerges from everyday human experience” (Sweetser 1990: 1). As
such, the two-level model of situation aspect outlined above applies to both
In addition to situation aspect, which is inherent in linguistic expressions
of situations in human languages, our research also identifies, on the basis
of corpus data, four perfective and four imperfective viewpoints in Chinese
(see Xiao and McEnery 2004a). Perfective aspects in Chinese include the
actual aspect marked by -le, the experiential aspect marked by -guo,
the delimitative aspect marked by verb reduplication, and the completive
aspect marked by resultative verb complements (RVCs). While these four
viewpoints all present situations perfectively, they have different focuses.
Specifically, -le focuses on the actuality of a situation, -guo on its experienti-
ality, verb reduplication on its delimitativeness, and RVCs on its completive-
ness. These viewpoints also interact with situation aspect in different ways
(see Xiao and McEnery 2004a for a detailed discussion of this).
Imperfective aspects in Chinese include the durative aspect marked
by -zhe, the progressive aspect marked by zai, the inceptive aspect
marked by -qilai, and the successive aspect marked by -xiaqu.
Although these viewpoints all present a situation as imperfective, each
of them has its own focus. Specifically, -zhe focuses on the durativeness
of a situation, zai focuses on its progressiveness, -qilai focuses on its
inceptiveness, and -xiaqu focuses on its successiveness.
While the perfective/imperfective dichotomy also applies to English, Eng-
lish does not have a productive morphological distinction between the two.
Rather English relies on other grammatical and semantic categories like tense
to encode this aspectual distinction. In relation to Chinese, English is a less
aspectual language with regard to viewpoint aspect. It only differentiates
Progressive (BE+V-ing)
Simplex viewpoints Perfect (HAVE+V-en)
Simple (finite verb)
Viewpoint Aspect
Complex viewpoints Perfect progressive

(HAVE + been + V-ing)
Figure 2.1 Viewpoint aspects in English.
Table 2.1 Combined Aspect/Tense Markers in English

Aspect Tense Description Linguistic form
Present Simple present V(-s)

Simple Past Simple past V-ed
Future Simple future will/shall/BE going to V
Present Present progressive is/am/are V-ing

Progressive Past Past progressive was/were V-ing
Future Future progressive will/shall be V-ing
Present Present perfect have/has V-en

Perfect Past Pluperfect had V-en
Future Future perfect will/shall have V-en
Present Present perfect progressive have/has been V-ing

Perfect
progressive Past Pluperfect progressive had been V-ing
Future Future perfect progressive will/shall have been V-ing
Aspect Marking in English and Chinese 13
between the simplex viewpoints of the ‘progressive’, the ‘perfect’, and the
‘simple aspect’ in addition to the complex viewpoint of the ‘perfect progres-
sive’ (cf. Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan 1999: 461; Svalberg
and Chuchu 1998), as illustrated in Figure 2.1. In the figure, the auxiliaries in
small capitals refer to lemmas, i.e. words representing all of their inflectional
word forms. The aspect markers in English, however, are combined with tense
markers morphologically and/or syntactically, as shown in Table 2.1.2
Having introduced the aspect markers in Chinese and the morphologi-
cally combined aspect/tense markers in English, it is now appropriate to
contrast aspect marking in Chinese and British/American English.
2.2 DISTRIBUTION OF ASPECT MARKERS

IN ENGLISH AND CHINESE
While Chinese has a sophisticated aspect marker system, consisting of four

perfective aspects and four imperfective aspects, the part-of-speech tagger we
used to analyze the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) only
recognized -le, -guo, zai, and -zhe as aspect markers.3 Hence, we decided
Table 2.2 Distribution of Aspect Markers in LCMC
Words Frequency per

Average Category (10k) Frequency 10k words %
K 5.8 1,674 289 12.00

M 1.2 322 268 11.13
P 5.8 1,384 238 9.88
Above the
R 1.8 387 215 8.92
average
L 4.8 1,024 214 8.88
G 15.4 3,140 204 8.47
N 5.8 1,107 191 7.93
A 8.8 1,539 175 7.26
Average Average of frequency per 10k words: 161 (6.68%)
F 8.8 1,057 120 4.98

C 3.4 365 108 4.48
Below the D 3.4 363 106 4.40
average B 5.4 561 104 4.32
J 16.0 1,355 84 3.49
E 7.6 412 54 2.24
H 6.0 231 39 1.62
to explore the four aspect markers in this chapter. The frequencies of these
markers in LCMC are shown in Table 2.2.
In English, perfective meaning is most commonly expressed by the simple
past (cf. Brinton 1988: 52), though the perfect can also mark perfectivity (Dahl
1999: 34). Imperfective meaning is typically signalled by the progressive, and
less often by the perfect progressive. For the purpose of contrasting English
aspect marking with Chinese we counted the distribution of the four aspects
of English. The frequencies of aspect markers in FLOB and Frown are given in
Tables 2.3 and 2.4. We used WordSmith to extract the required frequency data
from FLOB and Frown.4 Simple past forms include (1) all past form of a lexical
verb, verbs DO and BE; (2) all instances of the past form had (including the
contracted form) not followed by a past participle within a four-word range
to the right of the search word. Perfect constructions include all morphologi-
cal forms of HAVE (except having) followed by 0–2 words and then by a past
participle, but not followed by a present participle within a four-word range
to the right of the search pattern. The progressive forms (including the perfect
progressive) can be extracted using the search pattern of all forms of verb BE
followed by 0–2 words and then the present participles of all verbs.
Table 2.3 Distribution of Aspect Markers in FLOB

Frequency
per 10k
Average Category Words (10k) Frequency words %
Above P 5.8 5,673 978 11.17

(near to)
L 4.8 4,624 963 11.00
the average
N 5.8 5,255 906 10.34
K 5.8 5,169 891 10.17
M 1.2 997 831 9.49
R 1.8 1,313 729 8.32
A 8.8 5,166 587 6.70
G 15.4 8,257 536 6.12
Below the D 3.4 1,317 388 4.43

average
F 8.8 3,353 381 4.35
E 7.6 2,724 358 4.09
B 5.4 1,886 349 3.98
H 6.0 1,740 290 3.31
C 3.4 978 288 3.29
J 16.0 4,524 283 3.23
Tables 2.2–2.4 show that in both LCMC and FLOB/Frown, the text cat-
egories where the frequency of aspect markers is above average (categories
L, M, N, P, R, and K) or near to the average (categories A and G in Tables
2.3 and 2.4) are the five fiction categories (K–P) plus humour (R), biogra-
phies and essays (G), and news reportage (A). The text categories where
aspect markers occur least frequently include reports/official documents
(H), academic prose (J), skills/trades/hobbies (E), news reviews (C), news
editorials (B), religious writing (D), and popular lore (F).
In Chinese and the two major varieties of English considered here, there
is a great difference in usage between the first and second groups of texts,
which indicates that the two are basically different. Text categories such as
various types of fiction, humour, and biographies and essays are narrative
whereas reports/official documents, academic prose, and skills/trades/hob-
bies are expository. News reportage is a transitory category which is more
akin to narrative texts. The narrative vs. expository distinction “might also
be considered as distinguishing between active, event-oriented discourse and
more static, descriptive or expository types of discourse” (Biber 1988: 109).
Table 2.4 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Frown
Frequency
per 10k
Average Category Words (10k) Frequency words %
L 4.8 4,546 947 10.95

M 1.2 1,119 933 10.78
N 5.8 5,349 922 10.66
Above
(near to) P 5.8 5,238 903 10.44
the average
R 1.8 1,534 852 9.85
K 5.8 4,815 830 9.59
A 8.8 4,816 547 6.32
G 15.4 7,799 506 5.58
F 8.8 3,397 386 4.46

B 5.4 1,893 351 4.06
Below the E 7.6 2,617 344 3.98
average C 3.4 1,155 340 3.93
D 3.4 1,053 310 3.58
J 16.0 4,024 252 2.91
H 6.0 1,368 228 2.64
Narrative discourse is basically event-oriented whereas expository discourse
has an informational focus. Readers are advised to refer to Biber (1988) and
Xiao (2009b) for a discussion of the relationship between forms and functions
of linguistic features.
In order to test the statistical significance of the differences observed we
used the log-likelihood test (LL) (Dunning 1993), which indicates that in
both Chinese and the two varieties of English, the differences between the
distribution of aspect markers in narrative and expository texts are statisti-
cally significant (see Table 2.5).5 In all of the three corpora, aspect markers
occur in narrative texts twice as frequently as in expository texts (2.43 times
in LCMC, 2.21 times in FLOB and 2.27 times in Frown), which means that
the higher frequency of aspect markers in narrative texts over expository texts
is a common feature of Chinese and the two major varieties of English.
These findings confirm the claim by McEnery and Xiao (2002: 224–225)
that aspect markers in English and Chinese are significantly more frequent
in narrative texts than expository texts and allow us to generalize this claim
from the domain studied by McEnery and Xiao (ibid.), i.e. public health, to
English and Chinese in general. As can be seen from Figure 2.2, while the
two languages differ typologically, they show a strikingly similar distribution
pattern of aspect markers. It is also interesting to note that while British Eng-
lish and American English have developed variations, for example in spell-
ing (e.g. behaviour vs. behavior), word choice (e.g. petrol vs. gasoline), and
grammar (e.g. American English has two participle forms for the verb get,
namely got and gotten whereas British English only uses the form got) (cf.
Biber et al. 1999: 19), their use of aspect is strikingly similar—the curves for
the distribution of aspect markers for FLOB and Frown are almost identical
to each other (see Figure 2.2).
Table 2.5 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Narrative and Expository Texts

Significance
Corpus Type Categories Words Markers LL ratio level
LCMC Narrative K–R, A, G 494,000 10,577 2,796.53 <0.001

Expository B–F, H, J 506,000 4,344
FLOB Narrative K–R, A, G 494,000 36,454 7,771.37 <0.001
Frown Narrative K–R, A, G 494,000 35,216 7,950.98 <0.001
Note: A = news reportage; B = news editorials; C = news reviews; D = religious writing; E = skills/
trades/hobbies; F = popular lore; G = biographies and essays; H = reports/official documents;
J = academic prose; K = general fiction; L = mystery/detective fiction; M = science fiction;
N = adventure fiction; P = romantic fiction; R = humour.
corpus
FLOB
7500
Frown
LCMC
Frequency
5000
2500
0
A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R
Text type
Figure 2.2 Distribution of aspect markers (frequency).
Chinese and English, however, do show some differences in their distribu-

tion of aspect markers, as shown in Figure 2.3. The figure shows the distri-
bution of aspect markers, as percentages, in the fifteen text categories in the
three corpora. As can be seen, in comparison with the two major varieties
of English, aspect markers in Chinese occur more frequently in catego-
ries G (biographies and essays) and K (general fiction) but less frequently
in N (adventure fiction), L (mystery/detective fiction), P (romantic fiction),
H (reports/official documents), and E (skills/trades/hobbies). As the aspect
and tense markers in English combine morphologically, English typically
registers a considerably higher frequency of aspect/tense markers than Chi-
nese. In terms of proportions, however, aspect markers are more common
in Chinese for categories G and K but less frequent in N, L, H, and E (see
Table 2.6).
The relatively low frequency of aspect markers in category N (adventure
fiction) in relation to other fiction types is shown even more markedly in
the contrast of the N category between LCMC and FLOB/Frown. British
English and American English also differ in that the latter variety does not
show such a marked fluctuation in aspect marking in narrative texts, nota-
bly in biographies and essays (G) and the five types of fiction (K–P).
The general patterns as shown in Figure 2.3, however, may mask
some important differences in aspect marking in English and Chinese.
It may also mask some differences between the two major varieties of
English, though the contrast between the varieties is not as marked as
that between Chinese and English, as shown in Table 2.6. This table
gives the log-likelihood scores and significance levels of individual text
&
corpus
$ & $ $ FLOB
% Frown
10.0 $ % % $
% %
& LCMC
% $ & %
& & &

$
7.5
Percent
& &
%
$ $
%
5.0
%
& & $
& $ $
%
&
$ $
% % % $ &
$
2.5
& % %
&
0.0
Text type
Figure 2.3 Distribution of aspect markers (%).
Table 2.6 Contrasting the Distribution of Aspect Markers

LCMC vs. FLOB LCMC vs. Frown FLOB vs. Frown
LL Significance LL Significance LL Significance
Category score level score level score level
A 0.925 0.336 2.672 0.102 1.029 0.310
B 0.528 0.467 0.319 0.572 0.059 0.808
C 7.461 0.006 1.448 0.229 5.160 0.023
D 0.004 0.949 3.348 0.067 8.127 0.004
E 20.245 <0.001 18.162 <0.001 0.139 0.709
F 1.714 0.191 1.142 0.285 0.129 0.720
G 15.925 <0.001 20.211 <0.001 0.569 0.451
H 21.608 <0.001 21.937 <0.001 0.004 0.948
J 0.383 0.536 2.040 0.153 1.482 0.223
K 6.467 0.011 11.530 0.001 1.640 0.200
L 9.269 0.002 8.844 0.003 0.011 0.918
M 5.553 0.018 0.224 0.636 8.036 0.005
N 13.032 <0.001 16.305 <0.001 0.453 0.501
P 3.294 0.070 0.641 0.423 2.400 0.121
R 0.871 0.351 1.875 0.171 12.264 <0.001
categories (1 degree of freedom), where statistically significant scores
are highlighted. The table can be read in conjunction with Figure 2.3
or Tables 2.2–2.4 to identify the text categories where aspect markers
are significantly more (or less) common in Chinese and British/American
English. The calculations in Table 2.6 are based on standardized fre-
quencies (per 10,000 words).6
The picture becomes clearer if we examine perfective and imperfec-
tive markers separately. Figure 2.4 shows the percentages of perfective
markers occurring in each text category in the three corpora. As can be
seen, in expository texts (barring category E) perfective aspect markers in
LCMC generally occur more frequently than those in English whereas in
narrative texts (except for category G), perfective markers in English are
generally more frequent than those in Chinese. The relatively higher fre-
quency of perfective markers in narrative texts and their lower frequency
in expository texts in English can be accounted for by the fact that aspect
markers in English express both temporal and aspectual meanings. For
example, 82.5% of the 48,902 tokens of perfective markers in FLOB and
84.8% of the 46,866 tokens of perfective markers in Frown are simple past
forms. Narrative texts are normally related to what happened in the past
whereas expository texts are typically non-past. Hence the relatively high
frequency of perfective markers in narrative as opposed to expository texts
is understandable.
As would be expected, the contrast between British English and Ameri-
can English is once again not as marked as that between Chinese and either
variety of English (see Figure 2.4). The two varieties of English show more
$ $
&
$ % &
% $
% %
corpus
10 $ FLOB
% Frown
% $ & %
& LCMC
8 & & &
$
& &
Percent
6 %
$ %
$
& & &
4 & $ %
$
%
$ %
$ % %
$ $ &
$
2 & &
% %
Text type
Figure 2.4 Distribution of perfective aspect markers.

similarity in expository texts than in narrative texts. In expository texts,
the two varieties show a very similar distribution pattern except that British
English registers a slightly greater percentage of perfective markers in cate-
gories D, H, and J. Similarly, in narrative texts (except categories M and R),
British English generally shows a greater frequency of usage than American
English. One possible explanation for this is that while the perfect aspect is
typically more common in British English, the contrast in narrative texts is
more marked than in expository texts, as shown in Figure 2.5.
This finding is in line with Biber et al. (1999: 462), who observe that in
British English news the perfect aspect is much more common than in Ameri-
can English news. While the contrast between the three news categories in
FLOB and Frown is not as marked as that observed by Biber et al. (1.29
times more frequent in FLOB news categories), the perfect is indeed more
frequent in nearly all of the text categories in FLOB (except for category M).
The wide coverage of the perfect lends further credence to the claim of Biber
et al. (ibid.) that “BrE strongly favours the perfect in comparison with AmE.”
However, one should note that the ratio of the perfect in FLOB and Frown
(1.15 : 1) is slightly lower than that reported in Biber et al. (1.33 : 1).
In marked contrast, as can be seen in Figure 2.6, imperfective aspect
markers show a totally different distribution pattern from perfective mark-
ers. In expository texts, imperfective markers in both varieties of English
typically occur more frequently than those in Chinese whereas in narrative
texts, imperfective markers in Chinese are generally more frequent than
those in English.
140
120
Frequency per 10K words
100
80
Corpus
60
FLOB
40 Frown
Text type
Figure 2.5 Distribution of the perfect in FLOB/Frown.

15 &
corpus
$ FLOB
&
% Frown
& LCMC
& %
%
& %
10
$ $ $ &
Percent
$ %
$ % & $
%
& $ & %
% $
5 $
% $ $
$ %
& %
%
$ $ % $
& & %
& %
&
&
0 &
Text type
Figure 2.6 Distribution of imperfective aspect markers.
This phenomenon can be explained as follows. First, the progres-

sive marked by zai in Chinese can only signal the ongoing nature of a
dynamic situation literally. In contrast, in addition to its canonical use to
signal the ongoing nature of a situation, “the progressive in English has
a number of other specific uses that do not seem to fit under the general
defi nition of progressiveness” (Comrie 1976: 37). These “specifi c uses”
include its use to indicate habitual or iterative situations, to indicate
anticipated happenings in the future, and some idiomatic use to add a
greater emotive effect, i.e. the hyperbolic use of the progressive (cf. Leech
1971/1987: 27–29). While the different scope of uses of the progressive
in English and Chinese account for the slightly higher frequency of the
English imperfective markers in expository texts, it cannot explain the
relatively lower frequency of these markers in narrative texts. Neverthe-
less, we can fi nd an answer in the Chinese imperfective marker -zhe,
which accounts for 88% of the 3,836 instances of imperfective markers
in LCMC. This marker has three basic functions: to signal the dura-
tive nature of a situation, to occur in V1-zhe V2 constructions to provide
background information, and to occur in locative inversion/existential
constructions. Of the three functions of -zhe, only the fi rst is normally
used in expository texts. Hence, in spite of the high overall frequency of
-zhe in LCMC, only about 20% of all examples of -zhe occur in exposi-
tory texts. In contrast, all of the three discourse functions of -zhe apply
to narrative texts. Furthermore, in addition to inducing a background
effect, -zhe can also be used in an apparently “foregrounded” situation
to move narration forward. As such, it is hardly surprising that Chinese
imperfective markers occur more frequently in narrative texts than Eng-
lish imperfective markers.
Figure 2.6 also shows some important differences in the distribution of
imperfective markers in British English and American English. In expository
texts, imperfective markers in British English are typically more common
than in American English whereas in narrative texts (except for category N
and less markedly for the transitory category A), imperfective markers in
American English generally occur more frequently than in British English
(see Figure 2.7).
The narrative texts in FLOB/Frown are distributed mainly in the five
fiction types and humour. Yet imperfective markers in American English
are more frequent in four of these six genres. While imperfective markers
in British English are slightly more frequent than in American English for
category K, the difference is not statistically significant (58 vs. 57 instances
per 10,000 words). According to Biber et al. (1999: 462), the progressive
aspect in American English conversation is much more common than in
British English conversation. The imperfective markers we counted in this
study are the progressive and the perfect progressive. As perfect progressive
verb phrases are extremely rare in all categories (less than 0.5% of all verb
phrases according to Biber et al. 1999: 462), the influence of the perfect
progressive on the overall frequency may, in effect, be discarded. Fiction
and humour typically dwell on dialogue and thus bear a close resemblance
100
80
Frequency per 10K words
60
40
Corpus
20
FLOB
0 Frown
Text type
Figure 2.7 Distribution of imperfective markers in FLOB/Frown.

to conversation (cf. Biber 1988).7 As such, it is hardly surprising that imper-
fective markers in American English are more common in these genres than
those in British English.
2.3 CONCLUSIONS
As situation aspect is a language independent component of aspect (see

Xiao and McEnery 2002), we have focused on the contrast of viewpoint
aspect in this chapter. It can be seen from the above analysis that there are
both similarities and differences in the distribution of aspect markers in
Having established some basic differences between two varieties of Eng-
lish and Chinese, in the following chapter we will examine one feature
in detail and carry out a more fine-grained analysis of the relationship
between telicity and temporal adverbials in contrast.
3 Temporal Adverbials and Telicity
in English and Chinese
Telicity is generally accepted as one of the most important concepts in the

study of aspect (e.g. Vendler 1967; Comrie 1976; Dowty 1979; Verkuyl
1993; Smith 1997; Xiao and McEnery 2004a, 2004b), which is related to
the aspectual feature of whether a situation has an inherent, well-defi ned,
natural fi nal endpoint.1 For example, events such as running a mile and
reading a book have an inherent fi nal endpoint while those such as run-
ning and reading do not. The former are telic situations whereas the latter
are atelic. The telicity value of a situation not only affects the interaction
between situation aspect and viewpoint aspect (see Xiao and McEnery
2004a), it influences the choice of viewpoint aspect in translation as well
(cf. McEnery and Xiao 2002, 2005b).
While semantic features for the classification of situation aspect—such as
telicity, dynamicity, and durativity—are universal, linguistic tests for such
features are largely language specific and must be developed on the basis of
the languages under investigation (see Xiao and McEnery 2002). A number
of behavioural tests have been proposed to differentiate between telic and
atelic situations in English. For example, the entailment test proposed by
Garey (1957: 195) is widely accepted; it states that the telicity value of a
verb can be tested with the question “if one is verbing but interrupted while
verbing, has one verbed?” With an atelic situation the answer is “yes”,
while with a telic situation the answer is “no”. In more general terms, “an
atelic imperfective entails its perfective, but a telic imperfective does not”
(Brinton 1988: 26). The entailment test is essentially a semantic test which,
while useful, must be evaluated case by case and is hardly computationally
operational. Also, it does not apply to languages such as Chinese, where the
negative adverb mei ‘not’ negates the realization rather than the completion
of an event (see Chapter 6). To express the meaning intended in the entail-
ment test in Chinese, the RVC (i.e. resultative verb complement) form must
be used (see Xiao and McEnery 2004a).
From Vendler (1967: 101) onwards, the compatibility tests with for/
in-adverbials have been in operation as a diagnostic test for determining
the telicity value of a situation: an atelic situation is compatible with a
for-adverbial (e.g. John walked for an hour) whereas a telic situation is
compatible with an in-adverbial (e.g. John wrote a letter in an hour).
Temporal Adverbials and Telicity in English and Chinese 25
The compatibility tests are reliant on linguistic co-occurrences and
are thus more operational than semantic tests from the computational
perspective.
However, as we will see in section 3.1, not all situations that can take an
in-adverbial are telic and not all situations that can take a for-adverbial are
atelic. Furthermore, some situations can take both in- and for-adverbials
felicitously. This is because neither in- nor for-adverbials are monolithic.
They have different usage categories. There are two types of temporal
expressions indicating a period of time, namely, completive and durative
adverbials. The two correspond to in- and for-adverbials in English. This
chapter examines such temporal adverbials in English and Chinese on the
basis of written and spoken corpora of the two languages, with the aim
of establishing a scheme of usage categories of completive and durative
adverbials and their respective proportions using the quantitative data pro-
vided by the corpora. Such a classification scheme, as well as the frequency
data, proves a useful basis for quantification in designing algorithms for the
automatic detection of the telicity value of a situation.
The sections that follow will explore completive and durative adverbials
in English and Chinese, on the basis of which such temporal expressions in
the two languages will also be compared and contrasted.
3.1 COMPLETIVE AND DURATIVE ADVERBIALS IN ENGLISH
In English, durative and completive adverbials are typically instantiated

as in- and for-adverbials respectively (e.g. in an hour and for an hour).
They have been used as linguistic tests for the aspectual feature of telic-
ity since Vendler (1967), i.e. situations compatible with for-adverbials are
atelic while those compatible with in-adverbials are telic, as exemplified in
(1). 2 Nevertheless, as we observe in Xiao and McEnery (2004a, 2004b), not
all situations that can take a for-adverbial are atelic and not all situations
that can take an in-adverbial are telic (e.g. 2).
(1) a. Replace lid and bake for 1 hour. (FLOB: E)

b. Wrap it up in five minutes. (FLOB: M)
(2) a. I stood and read the menu for a while, discovering it served mainly
hamburgers. (FLOB: P)
b. < . . . > he hadn’t worked in six months. (FLOB: K)
(3) a. She stared unseeingly for an instant. (FLOB: P)

b. Can you leave us with her—for a while? (FLOB: K)
c. It was the worst day they have had for three years. (FLOB: A)
d. A RAPIST who preyed on women in two south-east London sub-
urbs was jailed for 20 years by a judge at the Old Bailey yesterday.
(FLOB: A)
It has been observed that for-adverbials are not monolithic. For exam-
ple, in Xiao and McEnery (2004b) we identify three types of meaning
expressed by for-adverbials: ‘duration’ (3a–b), ‘scope’ (3c), and ‘inten-
tion’ (3d). Here, we would like to extend this observation by distinguish-
ing between two types of duration, namely, duration proper (3a) and
duration of the resultant state of an achievement, i.e. resultant duration
(3b). Unfortunately, English uses the same for-adverbials to express all
of these meanings, which can be expressed using different devices in
other languages. For example, in Chinese, expressions like yi nian ‘one
year’ are used to indicate duration or intention while scope is expressed
by the preposition (zai) . . . zhong ‘during’, or (yi)lai ‘from . . . onwards’
if the situation lasts till the beginning of the stretch of speech in which it
is discussed (see section 3.2 for discussion of a related concept of ‘range’
in Chinese). As Tenny (1994: 6) observes, the relevant interpretation of
for-adverbials like for an hour, when used as a test for telicity values, is
that the event continues for an hour’s duration but does not necessarily
stop after one hour. This means that only for-adverbials of the (3a) type
are relevant to the telicity test.
Table 3.1 shows the distribution of for-adverbials across the four
usage categories in FLOB and BNCdemo. It can be seen that while the
majority of for-adverbials are used to indicate duration, there are a con-
siderable number of instances that are irrelevant to the telicity test. This
is especially true for written English. It is interesting to note that the
meaning categories of for-adverbials are closely associated with their
positions (see Figure 3.1). For-adverbials typically occur after the verb
in a clause (over 87% in FLOB and 97% in BNCdemo). They do not
normally appear in the pre-verbal position when they indicate intention
or resultant duration. The differences in the distribution of meaning
categories of for-adverbials across positions are statistically signifi cant
in both writing (with a Fisher’s Exact Test score of 10.088 for 3 degrees
of freedom and a significance level of 0.01) and speech (with a Fisher’s
Exact Test score of 10.261 for 3 degrees of freedom and a significance
level of 0.01). 3
Table 3.1 Distribution of for-adverbials Across Usage Categories
FLOB (1 m words) BNCdemo (4 m words)

Meaning category
Frequency Proportion (%) Frequency Proportion (%)
Duration 242 78.6 788 87.8
Resultant duration 22 7.1 72 8.0
Scope 23 7.5 7 0.8
Intention 21 6.8 31 3.4
Total 308 100 898 100
Figure 3.1 For-adverbials in FLOB and BNCdemo.
One further complication of using for-adverbials to test for telicity is that

a for-adverbial has the function of coercing a core-level accomplishment
into an activity at the clause level (cf. Xiao and McEnery 2004b), as dem-
onstrated by Dowty’s (1979: 61) examples:
(4) a. He read a book for/in an hour.

b. She combed her hair for/in five minutes.
In (4), He read a book and She combed her hair are accomplishments which
can take an in-adverbial felicitously. But when a for-adverbial is inserted,
the inherent fi nal endpoint of a core-level accomplishment is removed and
the situation is coerced into a temporally bounded activity at the clause
level. That accounts for why a situation can be compatible with both in-
and for-adverbials at the clause level.
In-adverbials are not monolithic either. They can refer to the time span
not later than the end of a specified period of time (referred to as ‘period’
hereafter, e.g. 5a), the time span after the period has passed, i.e. relative
future (referred to as ‘future’ hereafter, e.g. 5b), or the scope of the specified
period (referred to as ‘scope’ hereafter, e.g. 5c). Table 3.2 shows the distri-
bution of in-adverbials across the three meaning categories in FLOB and
BNCdemo. It can be seen that in written English their distribution is bal-
anced whereas in spoken English the future category is predominant while
the scope usage is rare. The distribution pattern in Frown (39%, 30%, and
31% for the three categories respectively) is very similar to that in FLOB.
Like for-adverbials, in-adverbials are also typically found after the verb in
a clause (over 80% in FLOB and 95% in BNCdemo). The three meaning
categories are equally possible for an in-adverbial in either pre-verbal or
post-verbal position in written English. The difference in the distribution of
meaning categories of in-adverbials across positions in writing is not statis-
tically significant (with a Fisher’s Exact Test score of 0.682 for 2 degrees of
freedom and a significance level of 0.651). In contrast, the future meaning
is predominant in both positions (94% and 79% respectively) in spoken
English, though post-verbal in-adverbials are also frequently (18% of the
time) found to express a period meaning (see Figure 3.2). The difference
in the distribution of meaning categories of in-adverbials across positions
in speech is marginally significant statistically (with a Fisher’s Exact Test
score of 6.114 for 2 degrees of freedom and a significance level of 0.042).
Table 3.2 Distribution of in-adverbials Across Usage Categories
Meaning category FLOB (1 m words) BNCdemo (4 m words)

Frequency Proportion (%) Frequency Proportion (%)
Future 20 31.7 587 79.8
Period 21 33.3 128 13.4
Scope 22 35.0 21 2.8
Total 63 100 736 100
Figure 3.2 In-adverbials in FLOB and BNCdemo.

Of the three meaning categories of in-adverbials, only the period mean-
ing is relevant to the telicity test. While the fi rst two usage categories are
generally recognized, the third has largely been overlooked, thus making
it difficult to account for the felicitous co-occurrence of an atelic situation
with an in-adverbial (e.g. 2b and 5c).
(5) a. Lizzie was on her feet and had it wrenched open in an instant.
(FLOB: P)
b. I’ll tell you why in a minute—but let’s order fi rst. (FLOB: N)
c. It was the area’s second clash in three days. (FLOB: A)
(6) a. < . . . > he hadn’t worked in six months. (FLOB: K)

b. I had not worked for a few months so I was ready to do something
(BNC: K51)
(7) a. Outside of the untraditional cities, I can not really recall seeing
one unclean individual in three months. (FLOB: E)
b. I saw Achim Freyer’s Iphigénie in Amsterdam the other day, and
that had more good visual ideas in the fi rst 10 minutes than I’ve
seen in this house for a year. (FLOB: A)
(8) a. It was the area’s second clash in three days. (FLOB: A)

b. WHITBREAD, the UK brewer and retailer, yesterday reported its
fi rst fall in profits for 16 years under the impact of the recession.
(FLOB: H)
It appears that the scope meaning of in-adverbials is typically found in,

but not confi ned to, its co-occurrences with ordinal numbers, compar-
ative and superlative adjectives, negative forms (e.g. not and n’t), and
words such as only. In-adverbials expressing a scope meaning are very
similar to for-adverbials and can in fact be replaced by the latter, as
shown in (6–8).
A comparison of the frequency of in-adverbials expressing a scope mean-
ing similar to for-adverbials in Brown/LOB and Frown/FLOB suggests that
this usage of in-adverbials is of American origin and that it is transferring
to British English. Figure 3.3 shows the distribution of in-adverbials across
meaning categories in the four corpora of the Brown family. It can be seen
that in the early 1960s, in-adverbials were rarely used to refer to a scope in
British English (only seven instances per million words) whereas its distri-
bution across the three categories was more balanced in American English.
By the early 1990s, in contrast, the frequency of the scope usage had risen
to 22 instances per million words, accounting for roughly one third of the
total occurrences in British English while in American English there was
not much fluctuation.
40
30
Frequency
20
Meaning category
10
future
period
0 scope
LOB FLOB Brow n Frow n
Corpus
Figure 3.3 Distribution of in-adverbials across usage categories.
When it expresses a scope meaning, not only can an atelic situation co-
occur with an in-adverbial (e.g. work in 6a), but a telic verb can co-occur
with a for-adverbial as well (e.g. see in 7b). In this context, the two types of
temporal expressions are interchangeable.4 It is important to note, however,
that while in-adverbials co-occurring with a negative form are more likely
to express a scope meaning (about two thirds of total instances), they can
express a period meaning and function as a telicity test, as shown in (9).
(9) a. With a smile the reviewer replied that he seldom came across a
book whose heart he could not tear out in an hour. (FLOB: G)
b. Rome was not built in a day: nor can strongholds of tradition rein-
forced with stubborn religious conviction, often biased and preju-
diced, be broken down in a moment. (LOB: D)
(10) a. I’ll be back in a while. (BNC: JYA)

b. Don’t worry, she won’t be back for a while. (BNC: FP7)
(11) a. And then the next little breath he’s off to America and you don’t
see him for four weeks. (BNC: KCT)
b. You don’t have to play for a fortnight, do you? (BNC: KD0)
c. You know, I can’t stay for a week in silence. (BNC: KBH)
d. I don’t want to go over there and sit for a year just waiting for the
phone to ring. (FLOB: A)
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
under Thérèse's: Her heart is as sadly rent as her gown. The picture was
entitled: Honeymoon in a Cemetery. Thérèse forced herself to smile; she
praised the drawing, which, despite its buffoonery, revealed the hand of the
master, and she made no reflection on the unfortunate choice of a subject. She
made a mistake: she would have done better to demand at the outset that
Laurent should not let his hilarity run about at random in long boots. She
allowed him to tread on her toes because she was still afraid that he might be ill
and might be seized with delirium in the midst of his dismal jesting.
Two or three other incidents of this nature having put her on her guard, she
began to wonder whether the unexciting, regular life which she sought to give
her friend was the regimen best adapted to that exceptional nature. She had
said to him:
"Perhaps you will be bored sometimes; but ennui is a welcome rest from
vertigo, and when your mental health has fully returned, you will be amused by
trifles and will know what real cheerfulness is."
But matters turned out differently. Laurent did not admit his ennui, but it was
impossible for him to endure it, and he vented it in strange and bitter caprices.
He lived a life of constant ups and downs. Abrupt transitions from reverie to wild
excitement, and from absolute indifference to noisy extravagance, became with
him a normal condition, and he could not live without them. The happiness that
he had found so delicious for a few days, began to irritate him like the sight of
the sea during a flat calm.
"You are lucky," he said to Thérèse, "to wake every morning with your heart
in the same place. You see, I lose mine while I am asleep. It is like the night-cap
my nurse used to put on my head when I was a baby; sometimes she found it at
my feet and sometimes on the floor."
Thérèse said to herself that it was impossible that serenity could come to
that troubled soul all at once, and that it must become accustomed to it by
degrees. To that end, he must not be prevented from returning sometimes to
active life; but how could she arrange it so that activity would not be a blemish,
a deadly blow dealt at their ideal? Thérèse could not be jealous of the
mistresses Laurent had had previously; but she could not understand how she
could kiss his brow on the morrow of a debauch. She must, therefore, since the
work, which he had resumed with great ardor, excited him instead of calming
him, seek with him a vent for that surplus energy. The natural vent would have
been the enthusiasm of love; but that was an additional source of excitement,
after which Laurent would fain have scaled the third heaven; lacking the
strength for that, he turned his eyes in the direction of hell, and his brain,
sometimes his very face, received a diabolical reflection therefrom.
Thérèse studied his tastes and his caprices, and was surprised to find them
easy to satisfy. Laurent was greedy of diversion and of surprises; it was not
necessary to take him among scenes of enchantment that could never exist in
real life; it was enough to take him no matter where, and provide some
amusement for him which he did not expect. If, instead of giving him a dinner at
home, Thérèse informed him, putting on her hat the while, that they were to dine
together at a restaurant, and if she suddenly asked him to take her to an entirely
different sort of play from the one to which she had previously asked him to take
her, he was overjoyed by that unexpected diversion and took the keenest
pleasure in it; whereas, if they simply carried out a plan marked out beforehand,
he was certain to feel an insurmountable distaste for it and a disposition to
sneer at everything. So Thérèse treated him as a convalescent child, to whom
one refuses nothing, and she chose to pay no heed to the resultant
inconveniences to which she was subjected.
The first and most serious was the danger of compromising her reputation.
She was commonly said to be, and known to be, virtuous. Everybody was not
convinced that she had never had any other lover than Laurent; indeed, some
person having reported that she had been seen in Italy years before with the
Comte de ——, who had a wife in America, she was supposed to have been
kept by the man whom she had actually married, and we have seen that
Thérèse preferred to endure that blot upon her fame rather than engage in a
scandalous contest with the miserable wretch whom she had loved; but every
one was agreed in considering her a prudent and sensible woman.
"She keeps up appearances," people said; "there is never any rivalry or
scandal about her; all her friends respect her and speak well of her. She is a
clever woman, and seeks nothing more than to pass unnoticed; which fact adds
to her merit."
When she was seen away from home, on Laurent's arm, people began to be
surprised, and the blame was all the more severe because she had kept clear of
it so long. Laurent's talent was highly esteemed by artists generally, but he had
very few real friends among them. They took it ill of him that he played the
gentleman with fashionable young men of another class, and, on the other
hand, his friends in that other class could not understand his conversion and did
not believe in it. So that Thérèse's fond and devoted love was regarded as a
frenzied caprice. Would a chaste woman have chosen for her lover, in
preference to all the serious men of her acquaintance, the only one who had led
a dissolute life with all the vilest harlots in Paris? And, in the eyes of those who
did not choose to condemn Thérèse, Laurent's violent passion seemed to be
simply a successful piece of lechery, of which he was shrewd enough to shake
himself clear when he was weary of it.
Thus on all sides Mademoiselle Jacques lost caste on account of the choice
which she had made and which she seemed desirous to advertise.
Such, unquestionably, was not Thérèse's purpose; but with Laurent,
although he had resolved to encompass her with respect, it was hardly possible
to conceal her mode of life. He could not renounce the outside world, and she
must either let him return thither alone to his destruction or go with him to
preserve him from destruction. He was accustomed to see the crowd and to be
seen by it. When he had lived in retirement a single day, he fancied that he had
fallen into a cellar, and shouted lustily for gas and sunlight.
In addition to this loss of consideration, Thérèse was called upon to make
another sacrifice: she was no longer sure of her footing pecuniarily. Hitherto she
had earned enough money by her work to live comfortably, but only by
observing strict regularity in her habits, by looking carefully after her expenses,
and by working faithfully and regularly. Laurent's passion for the unexpected
soon straitened her. She concealed her position from him, being unwilling to
refuse to sacrifice to him that priceless time which constitutes the larger part of
the artist's capital.
But all this was simply the frame of a much gloomier picture, over which
Thérèse threw a veil so thick that no one suspected her unhappiness, and her
friends, scandalized or distressed by her situation, held aloof from her, saying:
"She is intoxicated. Let us wait until she opens her eyes; that will come very
soon."
It had already come. Thérèse acquired more and more thoroughly every day
the sad certainty that Laurent no longer loved her, or loved her so little that there
was no further hope of happiness, either for him or for her, in their union. It was
in Italy that they both became absolutely certain of the fact, and we are now to
describe their journey thither.
VI
Laurent had long wanted to see Italy; it had been his dream from childhood,
and the unhoped-for sale of certain of his paintings made it possible at last for
him to realize that dream. He offered to take Thérèse, proudly displaying his
little fortune, and swearing by all he held dear that, if she would not go with him,
he would abandon the trip. Thérèse knew well that he would not abandon it
without regret and without bitterly reproaching her. So she exerted her utmost
ingenuity to obtain some money herself. She succeeded by pledging her future
work; and they set out late in the autumn.
Laurent had formed some very erroneous ideas concerning Italy, and
expected to find spring in December as soon as he caught sight of the
Mediterranean. He had to acknowledge his error, and to suffer from a very
sharp attack of frosty weather on the trip from Marseille to Genoa. Genoa
pleased him immensely, and as there were many pictures to see there, as it was
the principal object of the journey so far as he was concerned, he readily agreed
to stay there one or two months, and hired furnished apartments.
After a week, Laurent had seen everything, and Thérèse was just beginning
to settle down to painting; for it should be said here that she was obliged to
work. In order to obtain a few thousand-franc notes, she had made an
agreement with a dealer in pictures to bring him copies of several unpublished
portraits, which he proposed to have engraved. It was not an unpleasant task;
the dealer, being a man of taste, had specified a number of portraits by Van
Dyck, one at Genoa, one at Florence, etc. The copying of that master required a
special gift, by virtue of which Thérèse had developed her own talent and
earned a livelihood before she undertook to paint portraits on her own account;
but she must needs begin by obtaining permission from the owners of those
masterpieces; and, although she exerted herself to the utmost, a whole week
passed before she was able to begin to copy the portrait at Genoa.
Laurent felt in nowise disposed to copy anything under heaven. His
individuality was too pronounced and too fiery for that sort of work. He was
benefited in other ways by the sight of great works. That was his right. And yet,
many a great master, having so excellent an opportunity, would have been likely
to take advantage of it. Laurent was not yet twenty-five years of age, and might
still learn. That was Thérèse's opinion, who also saw an opportunity for him to
increase his pecuniary resources. If he would have condescended to copy a
Titian,—who was his favorite among the masters,—there was no doubt that the
same dealer who had commissioned Thérèse would have bought it or found a
purchaser for it. Laurent considered that an absurd idea. So long as he had
money in his pocket, he could not conceive how one could descend from the
lofty realms of art so far as to think of gain. He left Thérèse absorbed in
contemplation of her model, joking her a little in anticipation on the Van Dyck
she was going to paint, and trying to dishearten her with the terrible task she
had the courage to undertake. Then he roamed about the city, sorely perplexed
as to how he should employ the six weeks which Thérèse had asked for the
completion of her work.
Certainly, she had no time to spare with the short, dark, December days, and
facilities for working not to be compared with those of her own studio in Paris: a
wretched light, an enormous room heated very slightly or not at all, and swarms
of chattering tourists who, on the pretext of looking at her work, planted
themselves in front of her, or annoyed her with their absurd or impertinent
reflections. Ill with a severe cold, depressed, and, above all, alarmed by the
traces of ennui which she spied in Laurent's eyes, she returned to their
apartments at night to find him out of temper, or to wait for him until hunger
drove him home. Two days did not pass without his reproaching her for having
accepted a degrading task, and urging her to abandon it. Had not he money
enough for both, and why should his mistress refuse to share it with him?
Thérèse held firm; she knew that money would not last in Laurent's hands,
and that he very likely would not have enough to return home when he was tired
of Italy. She begged him to let her work, and to work himself according to his
own ideas, but as every artist can and should work when he has his future to
build.
He agreed that she was right, and resolved to set to work. He unpacked his
boxes, found a studio, and made several sketches; but, whether because of the
change of air and of habits, or because of the too recent sight of so many chefs-
d'œuvres which had moved him deeply and which he required time to digest, he
was conscious of a temporary impotence, and fell into one of those fits of the
blues which he could not throw off alone. It would have required some
excitement coming from without, superb music descending from the ceiling, an
Arabian steed coming through the key-hole, an unfamiliar literary masterpiece at
his hand, or, still better, a naval engagement in the harbor of Genoa, an
earthquake, or any other exciting event, pleasurable or terrible, which would
take him out of himself, and under the spell of which he would feel lifted up and
revivified.
Suddenly, amid his vague and confused aspirations, an evil idea sought him
out in spite of himself.
"When I think," he reflected, "that formerly" (that was the way he referred to
the time when he did not love Thérèse) "the slightest pleasure was enough to
restore me to life! I have to-day many things of which I used to dream—money,
that is to say, six months of leisure and liberty, Italy under my feet, the sea at my
door, a mistress as loving as a mother, and at the same time a serious and
intelligent friend; and all these are not enough to rekindle my energy! Whose
fault is it? Not mine, surely. I was not spoiled, and formerly it did not require so
much to divert me. When I think that the lightest wine used to go to my head as
quickly as the most generous vintage; that any saucy minx, with a provoking
glance and a problematical costume, was enough to raise my spirits and to
persuade me that such a conquest made me like one of the heroes of the
Regency! Did I need an ideal creature like Thérèse? How in the devil did I ever
persuade myself that both moral and physical beauty were necessary to me in
love? I used to be able to content myself with the least; therefore the most was
certain to crush me, since better is the enemy of good. And then, too, is there
such a thing as true beauty to the passions? The true is that which pleases.
That with which one is sated is as if it had never been. And then there is the
pleasure of changing, and therein, perhaps, lies the whole secret of life. To
change is to renew one's self; to be able to change is to be free. Is the artist
born to be a slave, and is it not slavery to remain faithful, or simply to pledge
one's faith?"
Laurent allowed himself to be persuaded by these old sophistries, always
new to minds that are adrift. He soon felt that he must express them to some
one, and that some one was Thérèse. So much the worse for her, since Laurent
saw no one else.
The evening conversation always began in about the same way:
"What a frightfully stupid place this is!"
One evening, he added:
"It must be a ghastly bore to be in a picture. I shouldn't like to be that model
you are copying. That poor lovely countess in the black and gold dress, who has
been hanging there two hundred years, must have damned herself in heaven—
if her soft eyes didn't damn her here—to see her image buried in this dismal
country."
"And yet," Thérèse replied, "she still has the privilege of beauty, the triumph
which survives death and which the hand of a master perpetuates. Although she
has crumbled to dust in her grave, she still has lovers; every day I see young
men, utterly insensible to the merits of the painting, stand in ecstatic
contemplation before that beauty which seems to breathe and smile with
triumphant tranquillity."
"She resembles you, Thérèse, do you know it? She has a little of the sphinx,
and I am not surprised at your admiration of her mysterious smile. They say that
artists always create after their own nature; it was perfectly natural that you
should select Van Dyck's portraits for your apprenticeship. He made women tall
and slender and elegant and proud, like your figure."
"You have reached the stage of compliment! Stop there, for I know that
mockery will come next."
"No, I am in no mood for jesting. You know well enough that I no longer jest.
With you one must take everything seriously, and I follow the prescription. I
simply have one depressing remark to make. It is that your dead and gone
countess must be tired of being beautiful always in the same way.—An idea,
Thérèse! a fantastic vision suggested by what you said just now. Listen."
A FANTASTIC VISION.
"A young man, who presumably had some
idea of sculpture, conceived a passion for a
marble statue on a tomb. He went mad over
it, and one day the poor devil raised the
stone to see what was left of that lovely
creature in the sarcophagus."
"A young man, who presumably had some idea of sculpture, conceived a
passion for a marble statue on a tomb. He went mad over it, and one day the
poor devil raised the stone to see what was left of that lovely creature in the
sarcophagus. He found there—what he was certain to find there, the idiot!—a
mummy! Thereupon, his reason returned, and he kissed the mummy, saying: 'I
love you better so; at least, you are something that has lived, while I was
enamored of a stone that has never been aware of its own existence.'"
"I don't understand," said Thérèse.
"Nor do I; but it may be that in love the statue is what one builds in his head,
and the mummy what he takes into his heart."
Another day, he sketched Thérèse, in a pensive, melancholy attitude, in an
album which she then looked through, finding there a dozen sketches of women
whose insolent attitudes and shameless expressions made her blush. They
were phantoms of the past which had passed through Laurent's memory, and
had clung to those white pages, perhaps, in spite of him. Thérèse, without a
word, tore out the leaf upon which she was given a place in that vile company,
threw it into the fire, closed the album, and placed it on the table; then she sat
down by the fire, put her foot on the andiron, and attempted to talk of something
else.
Laurent did not reply, but said to her:
"You are too proud, my dear! If you had burned all the leaves that offended
you and left only your own image in the album, I should have understood, and I
should have said: 'You do well;' but to withdraw and leave the others there,
signifies that you will never dispute possession of me with any one."
"I disputed possession of you with debauchery," Thérèse replied; "I shall
never do so much with any of those creatures."
"Well, that is pride, I say again; it is not love. Now, I disputed possession of
you with Virtue, and I would do the same with any one of her monks."
"Why should you? Aren't you tired of loving the statue? is not the mummy in
your heart?"
"Ah! you have a marvellous memory! Great God! what does a word amount
to? Every one interprets it as he pleases. An innocent man may be hanged for a
word. I see that I must be careful what I say with you; perhaps the most prudent
way would be never to talk together."
"Mon Dieu! have we reached that point?" said Thérèse, bursting into tears.
They had reached that point. To no purpose did Laurent melt with her tears
and beg her pardon for having caused them to flow: the trouble broke out afresh
the next day.
"What do you suppose will become of me in this detestable city?" he said to
her. "You want me to work; I have tried it and I can't do it. I was not born like
you, with a little steel spring in my brain, so that I have only to press the button
to set the will at work. I am a creator! Great or small, weak or powerful, a creator
is a machine which obeys nobody and which God sets in motion, when it seems
good to Him, with His breath or with the passing breeze. I am incapable of doing
anything whatsoever when I am bored, or when I do not like my surroundings."
"How is it possible for an intellectual man to be bored," said Thérèse, "unless
he is in a dungeon, deprived of light and air? Are there no beautiful things to see
in this city which enchanted you so the first day, no interesting excursions to
take in the neighborhood, no good book to consult, no intelligent people to talk
with?"
"I have been buried in beautiful things up to my eyes; I don't like to drive
alone; the best books irritate me when they tell me what I am not in the mood to
believe. As for making acquaintances—I have letters of recommendation which
you know very well that I can't use!"
"No, I don't know it; why not?"
"Because my friends in society naturally gave me letters to society people
here; but society people don't live shut up within four walls, without ever thinking
of amusing themselves; and as you are not in society, Thérèse, you can't go
with me, so I should have to go alone!"
"Why not in the day-time, as I have to work all day in that old palace?"
"In the day-time, people make calls, and form plans for the evening. The
evening is the time for amusement in all countries; don't you know that?"
"Very well, go out sometimes in the evening, since it must be so: go to balls
and conversazioni. Don't gamble, that is all I ask."
"And that is just what I cannot promise. In society, one must devote one's
self to play or to the ladies."
"So that all men in society either ruin themselves at play, or are involved in
love-affairs?"
"Those who don't do one or the other are terribly bored in society, or bore
other people terribly. I am not a salon conversationalist myself. I am not yet so
hollow that I can procure a hearing without saying anything. Tell me, Thérèse,
do you want me to take a plunge into society at our risk?"
"Not yet," said Thérèse; "be patient a little longer. Alas! I was not prepared to
lose you so soon!"
The sorrowful accent and heart-broken glance irritated Laurent more than
usual.
"You know," he said, "that you always bring me around to your wishes with
the slightest complaint, and you abuse your power, my poor Thérèse. Don't you
think you will be sorry for it some day, when you find me ill and exasperated?"
"I am sorry for it already, since I weary you," she replied. "So do what you
choose!"
"Then you abandon me to my fate? Are you already weary of the struggle?
Look you, my dear, it is you who no longer love me!"
"From the tone in which you say that, it seems to me that you wish that it
should be so!"
He answered no, but, a moment later, his every word said yes. Thérèse was
too serious, too proud, too modest. She was unwilling to descend with him from
the heights of the empyrean. A hasty word seemed to her an insult, a trivial
reminiscence incurred her censure. She was sober in everything, and had no
comprehension of capricious appetites, of extravagant fancies. She was the
better of the two, unquestionably, and if compliments were what she must have,
he was ready with them; but was it a matter of compliments between them?
Was not the important thing to devise some means of living together? Formerly,
she was more cheerfully inclined, she had been coquettish with him, and she
was no longer willing to be; now, she was like a sick bird on its perch, with
feathers rumpled, head between its shoulders, and lifeless eye. Her pale, dismal
face was enough to frighten one sometimes. In that huge, dark room, made
depressing by the remains of former splendor, she produced the effect of a
ghost upon him. At times, he was really afraid of her. Could she not fill that
gloomy void with strange songs and joyous peals of laughter?
"Come; what shall we do to shake off this deathly chill that freezes one's
shoulders? Sit down at the piano and play me a waltz. I will waltz all by myself.
Do you know how to waltz? I'll wager that you don't. You don't know anything
that isn't lugubrious!"
"Come," said Thérèse, rising, "let us leave this place at once, let come what
may! You will go mad here. It may be worse elsewhere; but I will go through with
my task to the end."
At that, Laurent lost his temper. So it was a task that she had imposed on
herself? So she was simply performing a duty in cold blood? Perhaps she had
taken a vow to the Virgin to consecrate her lover to her! All that she lacked now
was to turn nun!
He took his hat with that air of supreme disdain and of a definitive rupture of
relations which was natural to him. He went out without saying where he was
going. It was ten o'clock at night. Thérèse passed the night in horrible distress
of mind. He returned at daylight, and locked himself into his room, closing the
doors noisily. She dared not show herself for fear of irritating him, and went
softly to her own room. It was the first time that they had gone to sleep without a
word of affection or pardon.
The next day, instead of returning to her work, she packed her boxes and
made all her preparations for departure. He woke at three in the afternoon, and
asked her laughingly what she was thinking about. He had recovered his
senses, and made up his mind what to do. He had walked alone by the
seashore during the night; he had reflected, and had become calm once more.
"That great, roaring, monotonous sea irritated me," he said, gaily. "First of all,
I wrote some poetry. I compared myself to it. I was tempted to throw myself into
its greenish bosom! Then it seemed to me tiresome and absurd on the part of
the waves to be forever complaining because there are cliffs along the shore. If
they are not strong enough to destroy them, let them hold their peace! Let them
do like me, who do not propose to complain any more. See how charming I am
this morning; I have determined to work, I shall remain here. I have shaved with
great care. Kiss me, Thérèse, and let us not refer again to that idiotic last
evening. Unpack these trunks and take them away quickly! don't let me see
them again! They seem like a reproach, and I no longer deserve it."
There was a long interval between this off-hand way of making peace with
himself and the time when an anxious glance from Thérèse was enough to
make him bend both knees, and yet it was no more than three months.
Their thoughts were diverted by a surprise. Monsieur Palmer, who had
arrived in Genoa that morning, came to ask them to dine with him. Laurent was
enchanted by this diversion. Although he was always cold in his manners
toward other men, he leaped on the American's neck, saying that he was sent
by Heaven. Palmer was more surprised than flattered by this cordial welcome. A
single glance at Thérèse had sufficed to show him that it was not the effusion of
happiness. However, Laurent said nothing of his ennui, and Thérèse was
surprised to hear him praise the city and the country. He even declared that the
women were charming. How did he know them?
At eight o'clock, he called for his overcoat and went out. Palmer would have
taken his leave at the same time.
"Why don't you stay a little longer with Thérèse?" said Laurent. "It will please
her. We are altogether alone here. I am going out for an hour. Wait till I return
before you have your tea."
At eleven, Laurent had not returned. Thérèse was very much depressed.
She made vain efforts to conceal her despair. She was no longer anxious
simply, she felt that she was lost. Palmer saw it all, and pretended to see
nothing; he talked constantly to her to try to distract her thoughts; but, as
Laurent did not come, and it was not proper to wait for him after midnight, he
took his leave after pressing Thérèse's hand. Involuntarily he told her by that
pressure that he was not deceived by her courage, and that he realized the
extent of her disaster.
Laurent arrived at that moment, and saw Thérèse's emotion. He was no
sooner alone with her, than he began to jest with her in a tone which affected
not to descend to jealousy.
"Come," said she, "do not impose unnecessary pain upon me. Do you think
that Palmer is paying court to me? Let us go, I have already suggested it."
"No, my dear, I am not so absurd as that. Now that you have somebody for
company, and allow me to go out a little on my own account, everything is all
right, and I feel just in the mood to work."
"God grant it!" said Thérèse. "I will do whatever you wish; but, if you rejoice
because I have somebody to talk with, have the good taste not to refer to it as
you did just now; for I cannot stand it."
"What the devil are you angry about now? what did I say that hurt you so,
pray tell me? You are becoming far too sensitive and suspicious, my dear friend!
What harm would be done if the excellent Palmer should fall in love with you?"
"It would be very wrong in you to leave me alone with him, if you think what
you say."
"Ah! it would be wrong—to expose you to danger? You see that there is
danger, according to your own story, and that I was not mistaken!"
"Very good! then let us pass our evenings together and receive no one. I am
perfectly content. Is it a bargain?"
"You are very good, my dear Thérèse. Forgive me. I will stay with you, and
we will see whomever you choose; that will be the best and pleasantest
arrangement."
In truth, Laurent seemed to have come to his senses. He began a serious
study in his studio, and invited Thérèse to come to see it. Several days passed
without a storm. Palmer had not reappeared. But Laurent soon wearied of that
regular life and went in search of him, reproaching him for his desertion of his
friends. No sooner did he come to pass the evening with them than Laurent
invented a pretext for going out, and remained away until midnight.
One week passed in this way, then another. Laurent gave Thérèse one
evening out of three or four, and such an evening! she would have preferred
solitude.
Where did he go? She never knew. He did not appear in society: the damp,
cold weather precluded the idea that he went on the water for pleasure.
However, he often said that he had been on a boat, and his clothes smelt of tar.
He was learning to row, taking lessons of a fisherman in the harbor. He
pretended that the fatigue calmed the excitement of his nerves, and put him in
good condition for the next day's labor. Thérèse no longer dared to go to his
studio. He seemed annoyed when she expressed a wish to see his work. He did
not want her reflections when he was working out his own idea, nor did he wish
to have her come there and say nothing, which would make him feel as if she
were inclined to find fault. She was not to see his work until he deemed it worthy
to be seen. Formerly, he never began anything without explaining his idea to
her; now, he treated her like the public.
Two or three times he passed the whole night abroad. Thérèse did not
become accustomed to the anxiety these prolonged absences caused her. She
would have exasperated him by giving any sign that she noticed them; but, as
may be imagined, she watched him and tried to learn the truth. It was
impossible for her to follow him herself at night in a city full of sailors and
adventurers of all nations. Not for anything in the world would she have stooped
to have him followed by any one. She stole noiselessly into his room and looked
at him as he lay asleep. He seemed utterly exhausted. Perhaps he had, in
reality, undertaken a desperate struggle against himself, to deaden by physical
exercise the excessive activity of his thought.
One night she noticed that his clothes were muddy and torn, as if he had
actually been in a fight, or as if he had had a fall. Alarmed beyond measure, she
approached him, and discovered blood on his pillow; he had a slight wound on
the forehead. He was sleeping so soundly that she thought that she could,
without rousing him, partly uncover his breast to see if there was any other
wound; but he woke, and flew into a rage which was the coup de grâce to her.
She tried to fly, but he detained her by force, put on a dressing-gown, locked the
door, and then, striding excitedly up and down the room which was dimly lighted
by a small night-lamp, he poured forth at last all the suffering that was heaped
up in his heart.
"Enough of this," he said; "let us be frank with each other. We no longer love
each other, we have never loved each other! We have deceived each other; you
meant to take a lover; perhaps I was not the first nor the second, but no matter!
you wanted a servant, a slave; you thought that my unhappy disposition, my
debts, my ennui, my weariness of a life of debauchery, my illusions concerning
true love, would put me at your mercy, and that I could never recover
possession of myself. To carry such an enterprise to a successful issue, you
needed to have a happier disposition yourself, and more patience, more
flexibility, and, above all, more spirit! You have no spirit at all, Thérèse, be it said
without offence. You are all of a piece, monotonous, pig-headed, and
excessively vain of your pretended moderation, which is simply the philosophy
of short-sighted people with limited faculties. As for myself, I am a madman,
fickle, ungrateful, whatever you choose; but I am sincere, I am no selfish
schemer; I give myself, heart and soul, without reservation: that is why I resume
possession of myself in the same way. My moral liberty is a sacred thing, and I
allow no one to seize it. I simply entrusted it, not gave it to you; it was for you to
make a good use of it and to succeed in making me happy. Oh! do not try to say
that you did not want me! I know all about these tricks of modesty and these
evolutions of the female conscience. On the day that you yielded to me, I
realized that you thought you had conquered me, and that all that feigned
resistance, those tears of distress, and that constant pardoning of my temerity
were simply the old commonplace way of throwing a line, and luring the poor
fish, dazzled by the artificial fly, to nibble at the hook. I deceived you, Thérèse,
by pretending to be deceived by that fly; it was my privilege. You wished
adoration: I lavished it upon you without effort and without hypocrisy; you are
beautiful, and I desired you! But a woman is only a woman, and the lowest of
them all affords us as much pleasure as the greatest queen. You were simple
enough not to know it, and now you must depend upon yourself. You must
understand that monotony does not suit me, you must leave me to my instincts,
which are not always sublime, but which I cannot destroy without destroying
myself with them. Where is the harm, and why should we tear our hair? We
have been partners, and we separate, that is the whole of it. There is no need of
our hating and abusing each other just for that. Avenge yourself by granting the
prayers of the excellent Palmer, who is languishing for love of you; I shall rejoice
in his joy, and we three will continue to be the best friends in the world. You will
recover your charms of other days, which you have lost, and the brilliancy of
your lovely eyes, which are growing haggard and dull by dint of spying upon my
acts. I shall become once more the jolly fellow that I used to be, and we will
forget this nightmare that we are passing through together. Is it a bargain? You
don't answer. Do you prefer hatred? Beware! I have never hated, but I can learn
how; I learn quickly, you know! See, I clinched to-night with a drunken sailor
twice as tall and strong as I; I thrashed him soundly, and received only a
scratch. Beware lest I prove to be as strong mentally as physically on occasion,
and lest, in a contest of hatred and vengeance, I crush the devil in person
without leaving one of my hairs in his claws!"
Laurent, pale-faced and bitter, by turns ironical and frantic, with his hair in
disorder, his shirt torn, and his forehead smeared with blood, was so ghastly to
look at and to hear, that Thérèse felt all her love change into disgust. She was in
such despair at that moment that it did not occur to her to be afraid. Silent and
motionless in the chair in which she had seated herself, she allowed this torrent
of blasphemous words to roll forth unchecked, and, saying to herself that that
madman was quite capable of killing her, she awaited with frigid disdain and
absolute indifference the climax of his frenzy.
He held his peace when he no longer had the strength to speak. Thereupon,
she rose and left the room, without answering him by a single syllable, without
casting a single glance at him.
VII
Laurent was not so contemptible as his words implied; he did not really
believe a syllable of all the atrocious things he said to Thérèse during that
horrible night. He believed them at the moment, or, rather, he spoke without
heeding what he said. He remembered nothing of it after sleeping upon it, and if
he had been reminded of it, would have denied every word.
But one fact was undeniably true, that he was weary, for the moment, of
dignified love, and craved, with his whole heart, the degrading excitements of
the past. It was his punishment for following the evil path he had chosen early in
life,—a very harsh punishment, no doubt, of which we can readily imagine that
he complained bitterly, since he had not sinned with premeditation, but had
plunged laughingly into an abyss from which he supposed that he could easily
escape when he chose. But love is regulated by a code which seems to rest,
like all social codes, upon that terrible formula: No one is supposed to be
ignorant of the law! So much the worse for those who are ignorant of it! Let the
child go within reach of the claws of the panther, thinking to pat it: the panther
will make no allowance for such ignorance; it will devour the child because it is
not in its nature to spare him. And so with poison, with the lightning and with
vice, blind agents of the fatal law which man must study, or take the
consequences.
On the morrow of that explosion, naught remained in Laurent's memory save
a vague idea that he had had a decisive explanation with Thérèse, and that she
had seemed resigned.
"Perhaps everything is for the best," he thought, finding her as calm as when
he had parted from her.
And yet he was terrified by her pallor.
"That is nothing," she said, tranquilly; "this cold tires me a good deal, but it is
nothing more than a cold. It will have to run its course."
"Well, Thérèse," he said, "what is the present state of our relations? Have
you reflected? It is for you to decide. Are we to part in anger, or remain on the
footing of friendship as formerly?"
"I am not angry," she replied; "let us remain friends. Remain here, if you
please. I propose to finish my work and return to France in about a fortnight."
"But should I not go and live in some other house for the next fortnight?
aren't you afraid that people will talk?"
"Do whatever you think best. We have our own apartments here, entirely
independent of each other; we use nothing but the salon in common; I have no
use for it, and I give it up to you."
"No: on the other hand, I beg you to keep it. You will not hear me go out and
come in; I will never put my foot inside it if you forbid me."
"I forbid you nothing," replied Thérèse, "unless it be to think for a single
instant that your mistress can forgive you. As for your friend, she is superior to a
certain order of disappointment. She hopes that she can still be useful to you,
and you will always find her when you need any proof of friendship."
She offered him her hand, and went away to her work. Laurent did not
understand her. Such perfect self-control was something which he could not
comprehend, unfamiliar as he was with passive courage and silent resolution.
He believed that she expected to resume her influence over him, and that she
proposed to bring him back to love through friendship. He promised to yield to
no attack of weakness, and, in order to be more certain of himself, he resolved
to call some one to witness the fact of the rupture. He went to Palmer, confided
to him the wretched story of his love, and added:
"If you love Thérèse, as I think you do, my dear friend, make Thérèse love
you. I cannot be jealous of you, far from it. As I have made her unhappy
enough, and as I am convinced that you will be exceedingly kind to her, you will
relieve me of a subject of remorse which I am most anxious not to retain."
Laurent was surprised that Palmer made no reply.
"Do I offend you by speaking as I do?" he said. "Such is not my purpose. I
entertain friendship and esteem for you, yes, and respect, if you choose. If you
blame my conduct in this matter, tell me so; that will be preferable to this air of
indifference or disdain."
"I am indifferent neither to Thérèse's sorrows nor to yours," replied Palmer.
"But I spare you advice or reproaches which come too late. I believed that you
were made for each other; I am persuaded, now, that the greatest, yes, the only
happiness that you can confer upon each other is to part. As to my personal
feelings for Thérèse, I do not admit your right to question me, and as for those
sentiments which, in your judgment, I might succeed in arousing in her, you no
longer have the right, after what you have said, to express such a supposition in
my presence, much less in hers."
"That is true," rejoined Laurent, nonchalantly, "and I understand very well
what it means. I see that I shall be in the way here now, and I think that I shall
do as well to leave Genoa, in order not to embarrass any one."
He did, in fact, carry out his threat, after a very cold farewell to Thérèse, and
went straight to Florence, with the intention of plunging into society or work,
according to his caprice. It was exceedingly pleasant to him to say to himself:
"I will do whatever comes into my head, and there will be no one to suffer
and be anxious about me. It is the worst of tortures, when a man is no more
evilly disposed than I am, to have a victim constantly before one's eyes. Come, I
am free at last, and the evil that I may do will fall on myself alone!"
Doubtless, Thérèse was wrong not to let him see the depth of the wound he
had inflicted on her. She was too brave and too proud. Since she had
undertaken the cure of a desperately diseased nature, she should not have
recoiled from heroic remedies and painful operations. She should have made
that frenzied heart bleed freely, have overwhelmed him with reproaches, and
repaid insult with insult and stab with stab. If he had seen the suffering he had
caused, perhaps Laurent would have done justice to himself. Perhaps shame
and repentance would have saved his soul from the crime of murdering love in
cold blood.
But, after three months of fruitless efforts, Thérèse was disheartened. Did
she owe such absolute devotion to a man whom she had never desired to
enslave, who had forced himself upon her despite her grief and her melancholy
forebodings, who had clung to her steps like an abandoned child, and had cried
to her: "Take me under your wing, protect me, or I shall die here by the
roadside!"
And now that child cursed her for yielding to his outcries and his tears. He
accused her of having taken advantage of his weakness to deprive him of the
joys of liberty. He turned his back upon her, drawing a long breath, and
exclaiming: "At last, at last!"
"Since he is incurable," she thought, "what is the use of making him suffer?
Have I not proved that I could do nothing? Has he not told me, and, alas! almost
proved it to me, that I was stifling his genius by seeking to cure his fever? When
I thought that I had succeeded in disgusting him with dissipation, did I not
discover that he was more greedy of it than ever? When I said to him: 'Go back
into the world,' he dreaded my jealousy, and plunged into mysterious and
degrading debauchery; he returned home drunk, with torn clothes, and blood on
his face!"
On the day of Laurent's departure, Palmer asked Thérèse:
"Well, my friend, what do you propose to do? Shall I go after him?"
"No, certainly not!" she replied.
"Perhaps I could bring him back."
"I should be in despair if you did."
"Then you no longer love him?"
"No, not in the least."
There was a pause, after which Palmer continued in a thoughtful tone:
"Thérèse, I have some very important news for you. I hesitate, because I
fear to cause you additional emotion, and you are hardly in condition——"
"I beg your pardon, my friend. I am horribly depressed, but I am absolutely
calm, and prepared for anything."
"Very well, Thérèse; in that case, I will tell you that you are free: the Comte
de —— is no more."
"I know it," replied Thérèse. "I have known it a week."
"And you haven't told Laurent?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because some sort of reaction would have taken place in him instantly. You
know how anything unexpected upsets and excites him. One of two things
would have happened: either he would have imagined that my purpose in
informing him of the change in my position was to induce him to marry me, and
the horror of being bound to me would have intensified his aversion, or he would
have turned suddenly, of his own motion, to the idea of marriage, in one of
those paroxysms of devotion which sometimes seize him and which last—just a
quarter of an hour, to be succeeded by profound despair or frantic wrath. The
unfortunate creature is guilty enough toward me; it was not necessary to offer
fresh bait to his caprice, and an additional motive for him to perjure himself."
"Then you no longer esteem him?"
"I do not say that, my dear Palmer. I pity him, and do not accuse him.
Perhaps some other woman will make him happy and good. I have been unable
to do either. It is probably as much my fault as his. However that may be, it is
proved to my satisfaction that we never should have loved each other, and that
we should not make any further effort to do so."
"And now, Thérèse, will you not think of taking advantage of the liberty you
have recovered?"
"What advantage can I take of it?"
"You can marry again, and become acquainted with the joys of a happy
home."
"My dear Dick, I have loved twice in my life, and you see where I am now. It
is not in my destiny to be happy. It is too late to seek what has thus far eluded
me. I am thirty years old."
"It is just because you are thirty years old that you cannot do without love.
You have undergone the enthusiasm of passion, and that is just the age at
which women cannot escape it. It is because you have suffered, because you
have been inadequately loved, that the inextinguishable thirst for happiness is
bound to awake in you, and, it may be, to lead you from disappointment to
disappointment, into deeper abysses than that from which you are now
emerging."
"I trust not."
"Yes, of course, you trust not; but you are mistaken, Thérèse; everything is to
be feared from your time of life, your overstrained sensitiveness and the
deceitful tranquillity due to a moment of weariness and prostration. Love will
seek you out, do not doubt it, and you will be pursued and beset the moment
that you have recovered your liberty. Formerly, your isolation held in abeyance
the hopes of those who surrounded you; but now that Laurent has lowered you
in their esteem, all those who claimed to be your friends will seek to be your
lovers. You will inspire violent passions, and some there will be sufficiently
clever to persuade you. In a word——"
"In a word, Palmer, you consider me lost because I am unhappy! That is very
cruel of you, and you make me feel very keenly how debased I am!"
Thérèse put her hands over her face, and wept bitterly.
Palmer let her weep on; seeing that tears would be beneficial to her, he had
purposely provoked that outburst. When he saw that she was calmer, he knelt
before her.
"Thérèse," he said, "I have caused you bitter pain, but you must give me
credit for kindly intentions. I love you, Thérèse, I have always loved you, not
with a blind passion, but with all the faith and all the devotion of which I am
capable. I can see more plainly than ever that in your case a noble life has been
ruined and shattered by the fault of others. You are, in truth, debased in the
eyes of the world, but not in mine. On the contrary, your love for Laurent has
proved to me that you are a woman, and I love you better so than armed at all
points against every human frailty, as I once believed you to be. Listen to me,
Thérèse. I am a philosopher; that is to say, I consult common-sense and
tolerant ideas rather than the prejudices of society and the romantic subtleties of
sentiment. Though you were to plunge into the most deplorable disorders, I
should not cease to love you and esteem you, because you are one of those
women who cannot be led astray except by the heart. But why should you fall
into such a plight? It is perfectly clear to my mind, that if you should meet to-day
a devoted, tranquil, and faithful heart, exempt from those mental maladies which
sometimes make great artists and often bad husbands—a father, a brother, a
friend, in a word, a husband, you would be forever secure against danger and
misfortune in the future. Well, Thérèse, I venture to say that I am such a man.
There is nothing brilliant about me to dazzle you, but I have a stout heart to love
you. My confidence in you is absolute. As soon as you are happy, you will be
grateful, and once grateful, you will be loyal and rehabilitated forever. Say yes,
Thérèse; consent to marry me and consent at once, without alarm, without
scruples, without false delicacy, without distrust of yourself. I give you my life,
and ask nothing of you except to believe in me. I feel that I am strong enough
not to suffer from the tears which another's ingratitude may still cause you to
shed. I shall never reproach you with the past, and I undertake to make the
future so pleasant and so secure that no storm will ever tear you from my
bosom."
Palmer talked for a long while in this strain, with a heartfelt earnestness for
which Thérèse was unprepared. She tried to repel his confidence; but this
resistance was, in Palmer's eyes, a last remnant of mental disease which she
must stamp out herself. She felt that Palmer spoke the truth, but she felt also
that he proposed to assume a terrible task.
"No," she said, "I am not afraid of myself. I do not love Laurent, and I can
never love him again; but what about society, your mother, your country, your
social standing, the honor of your name? I am debased, as you have said; I am
conscious of it. Ah! Palmer, do not urge me so! I am too dismayed by the
thought of what you will have to defy for my sake!"
On the next day, and every day thereafter, Palmer pressed his suit
vigorously. He gave Thérèse no time to breathe. He was alone with her from
morning till night, and redoubled the force of his will to persuade her. Palmer
was a man of heart and of impulse; we shall see later whether Thérèse was
justified in hesitating. What disturbed her was the precipitation with which
Palmer acted, and sought to force her to act by pledging herself to him by a
promise.

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Corpus Linguistics 2nd Edition Tony Mcenery

Hyperbole in English A Corpus based Study of Exaggeration

Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions A

Phraseology in Corpus Based Translation Studies New Trends

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English Based on

A Web of New Words A Corpus Based Study of the

English Chinese and Chinese English glossary of

Developing Contrastive Pragmatics Interlanguage and Cross

1. Swearing in English 8. Public Discourses of Gay Men

7. Grammaticalization and English

Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery

New York London

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

© 2010 Taylor & Francis

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-84795-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-99245-9 (hbk)

List of Tables vii

2 Aspect Marking in English and Chinese 11

3 Temporal Adverbials and Telicity in English and Chinese 24

4 Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese 41

5 Passives in English and Chinese 74

6 Negation in English and Chinese: Variants and Variations 110

7 Negation in English and Chinese: Special Usages 147

8 Challenge and Promise, and the Way Forward 171

1.1 Genres Covered in FLOB, Frown and LCMC 9

2.1 Combined Aspect/Tense Markers in English 12

2.2 Distribution of Aspect Markers in LCMC 13

2.3 Distribution of Aspect Markers in FLOB 14

2.4 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Frown 15

2.5 Distribution of Aspect Markers in Narrative and

2.6 Contrasting the Distribution of Aspect Markers 18

3.1 Distribution of for-adverbials Across Usage Categories 26

3.2 Distribution of in-adverbials Across Usage Categories 28

3.3 Distribution of Pre-Verbal Time Expressions Across Usage

3.4 Distribution of Post-Verbal Time Expressions Across Usage

4.1 Eight Categories of Classifiers in Chinese 48

4.2 Common Classifiers in English 60

5.1 Frequencies of be and get Passives in FLOB and BNCdemo 75

5.2 Long vs. Short Passives in FLOB and BNCdemo 76

5.3 Semantic Properties of be and get Passives in FLOB and

5.4 Distribution of be/get Passives (per 100k words) 83

5.6 Long and Short Passives in LCMC and CallHome 91

5.7 Syntactic Functions of Passive Constructions in Chinese 95

5.8 Interaction Between Passives and Aspect 96

5.9 A Breakdown of Syntactic Functions and Aspect Markers

5.10 Chinese Passive Markers Across Meaning Categories 98

5.11 Normalized Frequencies of Chinese Passive Markers

6.1 Normalized Frequencies and Proportions of Negative

6.2 Usage Categories of anybody, anyone, and anything 118

6.3 Subject-Operator Inversions in FLOB and BNCdemo 122

6.4 Proposals of Major Distinctions Between bu and mei 126

6.5 Negative Affi xes in English and Chinese 142

2.1 Viewpoint aspects in English. 12