The Information Prominence of Chinese Experiential Aspect Marker guo and Its Explanatory Power to the Grammatical Meaning of guo

The Chinese experiential aspect marker -guo has been studied broadly, especially its semantics. In previous studies, the semantics of -guo is generalized as repeatability or discontinuity, each having counter-examples though. In this article, to give an adequate explanation of the distributional pattern of -guo, it proposes that information prominence is constraint on the felicitous usage of -guo, and repeatability and discontinuity originate from the conditions that ensure the information prominence. Due to the constraint of information prominence, V-guo requires different opposite amounts of information in affirmative and negative structures. The realization of information prominence resides on the configuration of figure and background. Figure is represented by the marked event, whose discontinuity ensures its prominence, where discontinuity of -guo comes from. Background is closely associated with the repeatability of -guo, and is configured by a “number” concept to ensure the event set, from which the repeatability is derived. With this new proposal, the semantic properties -guo described by previous studies can be explained in the same framework, and thus the repeatability and discontinuity can be unified.