The Selectional Constraint of the Chinese Progressive Operator zai

Previous studies on the Chinese progressive mainly focus on the distinctions between Chinese progressive zai and the continuous -zhe, but few has noticed that the progressive zai is sensitive to the plurality of the event encoded by the predicate in its scope. Inspired by the observations of the selectional constraints of the English progressive, this paper aims to find out the selectional constraints of Chinese progressive zai. It is argued that Chinese progressive zai requires its modified predicates to denote singular durative events as its English counterpart do. Given that no studies have illustrated the semantic criterion for identifying predicates denoting singular events in Mandarin, this study proposes that singular telic (incremental) predicates compatible with zai are those with singular atoms or singular groups as the incremental themes and singular atelic predicates co-occurring with zai are those being incremental homogeneous. An incremental accomplishment with a singular atom as the theme is expressed by the combination of an incremental verb and a quantized incremental object with the cardinal numeral quantifier yi ‘one’ as the measure phrase, while that with a singular group as the theme is expressed by the combination of an incremental verb and a definite object modified by the definite determiner like na ‘that/those’. In contrast, incremental homogeneous predicates are expressed by activities or plural achievements.