| The study of Aspect is an important field of linguistic research, and there has been heated debate among linguistics. Furthermore, the study of English Aspect is influenced by Slavonic languages; and the study of Chinese Aspect is then affected by English. So there appear some controversial topics that whether there is aspect in English or tense in Chinese. And the traditional view did not differentiate grammatical Aspect from semantic Aspect. Here we adopt Smith's (1997) view of aspect: there are two types of aspects, one is situation aspect, and the other is viewpoint aspect. A situation aspect may be considered as an event, action, process or state of affairs, while the speaker may view the situation aspect as dynamic, static, durative, completed or not, etc. Finally the aspect of a sentence which may belong to perfectivity or imperfectivity is determined by the situation aspect and viewpoint aspect.With the development and the popularity of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive theories and approaches provide us with a new approach to language study. Based on boundedness and unboundedness, perspective and prototype, this thesis explores the two languages'aspects. Similarities and dissimilarities are made clear. In Chinese, aspect markers are more prominent than those in English, Chinese employs temporal adverbials such as昨天,明天, aspect markers such as le, zhe to express temporal and aspectual meaning respectively, moreover, they are more free use in Chinese. On the other hand, in English inflectional morphemes of verbs are employed to express the concept of aspect. Aspect is embodied in verbs compulsively, obligatorily and morphologically. In English the perfective aspect is expressed by perfect and the imperfective is denoted by be + ving. While in Chinese, distinction between perfective and imperfective is the linguists'major concern, and perfective is denoted by the aspect marker le, within the imperfective, there is progressive aspect zai and stative aspect zhe.
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