Modern Chinese Time System

The tense system of modern Chinese has experienced a process of development. At first, because of a lack of morphological changes in Chinese language and Chinese cannot use marked morphological changes to express tense, so Chinese scholars considered that Chinese had no tense system. With the in-depth study of Chinese own characteristics, more and more scholars found Chinese has tense system, and tense system exists in a variety of languages. The performance of the tense system of Chinese is different from Indo-European language. Indo-European language use syntax means, and Chinese uses multi-word means. This paper is divided into three parts, five chapters, to elaborate the tense system of modern Chinese.The first part is the first chapter which introduces the topic of this article and topic basis, the research meaning, research purpose and innovation of the tense system of modern Chinese.The second part is the second chapter to chapter Ⅳ, which is the most important sections of the article and discussed the concept of modern Chinese tense system, nine patterns and their manifestations.The second chapter introduces the concept of the tense system. From a diachronic perspective, the concept of tense experienced a long process of change. From nonexistence to pass into existence, from the simple to the overall.Many scholars have defined tense system, based on the research of the scholars, this paper distinguished the narrow and broad concepts of tense. Tense in a narrow sense use marked grammar means to express the grammatical category of tense, which means that the time behavior of the action occurred. Tense in a broad sense doesn’t base on marked grammar means, it is embodied in all languages which have the concept of time category.Tense in a broad sense express the time of the event, specifically referring to the occurred time and speaking time of the incident, the relationships between incident time and reference time on the timeline. Tense in a narrow sense is a shape-change of tense in a broad sense; they are unified when they express tense of the language.The third chapter studies the pattern of tense system. There are four kinds of time concept associated with tense:time reflected by verb in the sentence, event time, speaking time and reference time. In the tense system, the last three concepts are very important. Event time is the time that an event occurs. Speaking time is the time to speaking about an event. Reference time is used to refer to the time of an event.There are three concepts of time. The relationship between event time and speaking time is called absolute tense. While another relationship between event time and reference time is regarded as relative tense. Absolute tense includes absolute past tense, absolute present tense and absolute future tense. Relative tense contains relative past tense, relative present tense and relative future tense. Making absolute tense and relative tense together, we can find nine types of tense:relative past tense-absolute past tense, relative past tense-absolute present tense, relative past tense-absolute future tense, relative present tense-absolute past tense, relative present tense-absolute present tense, relative present tense-absolute future tense, relative future tense-absolute past tense, relative future tense-absolute present tense, relative future tense-absolute future tense.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the express means of tense. This chapter accounts for the largest. The article first introduces the narrow and broad expression, and then analyzes the performance of the tense of modern Chinese. Tense in a narrow sense mainly uses grammar, which divided into lexical means and methods of syntax. Tense in a broad sense uses vocabulary means and zero form to express tense. Chinese mainly depends on tense in a broad sense. Among them, the words means uses often, includes the time nouns, time adverbs, table of conjunction, the positional phrases table and table of prepositional phrases. Chinese can also uses a variety of vocabulary means, means of grammar, and vocabulary together to express tense in the same sentence.The third part is the fifth chapter----the epilogue, which summarizes the main results that obtained in this article, and pointed out the insufficiency of the article.