Time in a Language Without Tense: The Case of Chinese  

Oleh:

Jo-Wang Lin

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 23 no. 1 (Feb. 2006), page 1–53.
Topik: Language; Chinese Language
Fulltext: vol 23, no 1,p 1-53.pdf (316.95KB)

Isi artikel

This paper outlines a framework of the temporal interpretation in Chinese with a special focus on complement and relative clauses. It argues that not only does Chinese have no morphological tenses but there is no need to resort to covert semantic features under a tense node in order to interpret time in Chinese. Instead, it utilises various factors such as the information provided by default aspect, the tenseaspect particles, and pragmatic reasoning to determine the temporal interpretation of sentences. It is shown that aspectual markers in Chinese play the same role that tense plays in a tense language. This result implies that the Chinese phrase structure has AspP above VP but no TP is above AspP.

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