The Expression Of Past Tense In Chinese

There is a past tense system in Chinese. If a event happened before the saying time or the time when another event happens, we could say it happened in the past. The past tense of which reference time is saying time is called simple past, and the past tense of which reference time is the time when another event happens is called anterior. To understand Chinese past tense system well, it is necessary to distinguish past and anterior tense.This article analyses the expressions of the past tense in Chinese from the view of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We find that Chinese past tense system is often expressed by the lexical meaning, special structure, grammar form etc, and that the lexical meaning is one of the most important methods to express the past tense. For example, both time noun and time adverb can clearly mark the time when the event happens, and some special time structure also can locate the relative time position of two events. The particle " de " and " laizhe " are past tense markers, and the aspect particle"le"and"guo" have time deictic expression functions. In addition, the article also tries to analyze the Chinese past tense system, combined with extra-language factors, such as context, narrative and so on.To clearly account for the Chinese past tense system, this article adopts reduction of research method and confirms a grammar form by analyzing a lot of examples of Modern Chinese and its dialect.