A Typological Approach To Tense And Aspect In English And Chinese

Tense and aspect have been hotly debated topics and research challenges incontemporary linguistics. Much more researches and debates have converged at aspectcompared with tense, and no agreement has been reached on the core issue in theresearch of aspect. The concept of aspect has been adopted to capture the temporalfeatures and all kinds of situations in reality expressed by components or structures atdifferent levels of grammar, such as verb aspect, lexical aspect and situation aspect at theverb level, and grammatical aspect and viewpoint aspect at the sentence level. Theconcepts at the verb level are applied to describing the temporal semantic features orinherent situations of verbs or VPs, while those at the sentence level are used to expounddifferent processes or states of reality situations indicated by various grammatical meansin sentences.The approaches to tense and aspect abroad are developed mainly from cognitivelinguistics, linguistic typology, theoretical system of aspect, formal semantics, ERStemporal theories, and so on. But there are overlaps among the subclasses of the aspectsystems established by most researchers, and precise aspectual oppositions and logicalaspect system have not formed yet. Furthermore, the tense and aspect of English iswaiting to be logically systematized.The researches on tense and aspect in China are mainly focused on whether MandarinChinese has tense and aspect categories, and if there are, what they are like. But the tenseand aspect systems established by scholars are quite different, and some scholars eventake over the concepts of tense and aspect directly from English and Russian. The tenseand aspect systems and their relations of Mandarin Chinese are to be clarified.In general, the common approach to tense and aspect and the ERS tense-aspecttheories or models in the previous researches are far from perfect. A comprehensive ERSlogical model to describe tense and aspect across languages is urgent to be established.The above-mentioned problems can be attributed to several factors, such as settingdifferent definitions to tense and aspect, neglecting different aspect types across languages, and lacking persuasive tense-aspect logical framework.For the current researches and problems of English-Chinese tense and aspect systemsat home and abroad, the present research discusses tense and aspect simultaneously inorder to seek the relation between language forms and tense-aspect meanings. We definetense and aspect as semantic categories at sentence level, and take a research paradigm ofcombing functionalism and formalism. The study takes in related theories from linguistictypology, cognitive linguistics, formal semantics and generative grammar, aiming toprovide a comprehensive description and explanation.The research makes contributions to several aspects: cross-language tense-aspectencoding devices and tense-aspect types, English-Chinese-Russian tense-aspect systemsand implicational universals, tense-aspect ERS logical model and its application, whichcan be embodied in the following:(1) Tense and aspect across languages can be encoded through affix, particle,auxiliary, tone, non-affix morpheme, and anti-passive voice. Though the encodingdevices of tense and aspect vary a lot in the world languages, iconicity principleespecially sequence iconicity plays an important role in the relation between tense-aspectencoding ways and meanings. In terms of cross-language tense types, English andChinese do not have typical dichotomy-tense or ternary-tense, but they both have certainways to express past tense, present tense and future tense. From the perspective of thedegree of grammaticalization, English shows past tense vs. non-past tense opposition,while Chinese exhibits future tense vs. non-future tense opposition. As to aspect typescross languages, both English and Chinese have realis aspect vs. irrealis aspectopposition which is based on temporal viewpoint; while the Slavic languages of Russian,Polish and Czech have perfective aspect vs. imperfective aspect opposition which isbased on spatial viewpoint. The two aspect types belong to superordinate aspectualoppositions and each aspect has its own subordinate aspectual meanings.(2) In terms of the relation between tense and aspect, English, Chinese, Burmese,Manipuri, and Tukang Besi conform to the logical relation of future tense implicatingirrealis aspect, while Russian, Polish and Czech follow the logical relation of presenttense implicating imperfective aspect. A tetrachoric table is attested among the two logical implications. The former excludes future tense+realis aspect, while the laterrules out present tense+perfective aspect. The difference in English-Chinese andRussian aspect types and their logical implications can be attributed to their differentcognitive patterns of time. English and Chinese belong to moving-ego model language orAscending Time language, while Russian is moving-time model language or DescendingTime language. The common point of the two cognitive patterns of time is they bothadopt static reference object. English and Chinese choose time points or time intervals atthe time axis as the reference, namely temporal viewpoint aspect, while Russian selectsthe points or intervals in the static real world as the reference, i.e. spatial viewpointaspect.(3) The tense-aspect systems in English, Chinese and Russian can be represented byERS relations, and all of their ERS tense-aspect structures fall in the ERS logical model.In this research, the total number of ERS tense-aspect structures in both English andChinese accounts for33, which is a semantic universal of English-Chinese tense andaspect. The number of both tense-aspect co-occurrences and ERS relations in Russian isfar less than English and Chinese. The reason lies in that English-Chinese realis/irrealisaspects have nothing to do with RE relation which only hold relations to the subordinateaspects, but Russian perfective/imperfective aspects and their respective subordinateaspects are determined by RE relations, that is, RE relations restrict both superordinateand subordinate aspects, so those RE relations which do not meet the requirement areruled out. The research shows that the tense-aspect ERS model is quite effective insolving some tense and aspect problems in English and Chinese.(4) Time adverbials in English and Chinese simple sentences have something both incommon and difference in semantic and syntactic grounds. In the aspect of semanticcommonality, there is no direct relation between time adverbials and tense in bothEnglish and Chinese simple sentences, and time adverbials function as modifiers tomodify either reference time R or event time E in nature. In both English and Chinese,the conflict between the reference time R modified by time adverbial and the R triggeredby tense will bring about ungrammatical sentences. In the aspect of semantic difference,English sentence-initial time adverbials tend to modify R, and the sentence-end ones may modify either R or E, while Chinese sentence-initial time adverbials may modify either Ror E because of word order restriction. In English that time adverbials can modify eitherR or E may lead to ambiguous sentences, while in Chinese ambiguous sentencesincluding sentence-initial time adverbial and the particle guo, whether guo binds orintroduces a situation variable not only triggers ambiguity but also decides whethersentence-initial time adverbial modifies R or E. Syntactically, both English and Chinesetime adverbials can be regarded as adjuncts, and the time adverbials to modify R areadjoined to AspP, while the ones to modify E are adjoined to VP or vP. Chinese timeadverbials move leftward to sentence-initial position motivated by topicalization. TheIsomorphic Principle is not a completely universal principle in Chinese for decidingoperator scope because inverse scope interpretation is allowed sometimes in Chinese.English time adverbial excluding the ones to express frequency (or Chinese timecomplement) is a kind of non-selective variable binding operator, and tense operator andnegation operator belong to simple statement variable binding operator, while aspectoperator is a kind of selective variable binding operator. When different types ofoperators co-occur in logical formula, there are two restrictions: on the one hand, thescopes of tense operator, sentence aspect operator and verb aspect operator will alwaysbe arranged from wide scope to narrow scope; on the other hand, the adjacent operatorsneed to observe the Semantic Compatibility Principle (SCP), that is, the semanticcompatibility of the adjacent operators or the variants they bind is a necessary conditionfor acceptable logical formula and sentence.This study has made a certain theoretical breakthrough in linguistic typology andgeneral linguistics. On the one hand, English-Chinese tense-aspect systems weestablished fill in the gap that English-Chinese tense and aspect are seldom studied at thesame time, and the tense and aspect implications not only make up the researchinsufficiency of the relation between tense and aspect but also enrich the typologicalachievement in tense and aspect, which provide some meaningful inspirations andreferences to future study in tense-aspect across languages. On the other hand, based onthe fact that event time E and reference time R can either be time point or time interval,we have established an ERS tense-aspect logical model, which not only improves the previous ERS theories but also presents a theoretical framework for the research oftense-aspect individuality and universality.Moreover, this study has some practical values. The detailed discussion of thesemantic relevance of tense-aspect to ERS has revealed some puzzles and problems inthe former traditional grammar, which is helpful for some fields, including Englishteaching, Mandarin Chinese teaching, computer natural language processing and TCFL.