| Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are both considered aspect languages for the simple reason that they both mark grammatical aspect morphologically: the former attaches a particle expressing only aspectual meaning to the root of a verb, while the latter attaches a suffix expressing both aspectual and tense meaning to the root of a verb. Since tense plays a part of grammatical aspect in Spanish, we make distinction between two tenses, verbal tense and chronological tense. We describe in detail the entire inventory of aspect in both languages and use Javier Maria's novel, Corazon tan blanco and its Mandarin translation as our corpora to compare the manifestation of aspect in the following categories: singular eventives, singular statives, recurrences, indirect reported speech and cleft constructions. We find Mandarin Chinese and Spanish share only one similarity and four differences: grammatical aspect is completely independent of lexical aspect in both languages but they are distinct in inventory, in the relation between tense and aspect, in the presence of an aspectual marker and in perspective. |
