| There are many time or time-related words in all the languages, and it is no exception in Chinese or Japanese. Words, which reflect the existence of things, all kinds of activities and varities, have the character of time, and they are time nouns or time adverbs relating to our daily life.Time adverbs play an important role in reflection of time, so the research on time adverbs occupies an important position in grammer research. Because of the crowd of time adverbs in Chinese or Japanese, the research on them has got started long before. However, the classification of matching time adverbs with predicate verbs is different in two languages. In Japanese, the classification research on time adverbs is mostly according to the movement of time, which bases on the time forms of past, present, and future. In contrast, there is no transform of verbs in Chinese, so some people classify time adverbs according to the progress of time; some according to the reflective condition of verbs combining the word meaning in a specific sentence.As we know, there are two main characters of time in sentences with verbal predicates. One character is that the action is happened before or after when the speaker begins, and is it lasting or not? In other words, the tense of this action is past, present or future. Another is aspect, i.e. words are classified according to their functions in context. Time adverbs are adverbs to modify verbs in Japanese. In a word, time adverbs are coherent with verbs used in predicative sentences, so the concept of time and the tense and aspect are in agreement.Time adverbs are reclassified according to the classification of Chinese time adverbs and the preceding research in Japanese in this paper. There are two classifications of time adverbs based on actions and perfective or imperfective situations in sentences. And then perfective and imperfective time adverbs will be subclassified.Perfective time adverbs are divided into five groups according to the situation which the action existed in the process of time:(1) the action was done early; (2) the action has been taken and is lasting untill now; (3) the action realized after a long time; (4) the action is just finished now; (5) the action will be intrigued by other actions.While imperfective time adverbs can be divided into six groups, refering to whether the unfinished action is lasting from the past, or it is going on, or it exists from now to some time in the future, or it is a routine or happens at frequent intervals.In addition, this paper focuses on comparing time adverbs with similar meaning between Japanese and Chinese, and studying the similarity and difference of them. Last but no least, five common Japanese time adverbs are taken as examples to compare the conresponding adverbs in Chinese, and details are explored in the study.In a word, this study will contribute to Japanese learning and research more or less through classification and analysis of comparison between Japanese and Chinese. |
