A Typological Study On Mightiness And Expansion Of Tense And Aspect

Conceptually,tense refers to the time location of a situation,while aspect refers to the stage or phrase of a situation observed from different perspectives.Tense and aspect are pervasively exist in all languages of the world,while the tendency of how to present the category of tense and aspect is not consistent cross-linguistically,different languages have different profiles on the expression of these two categories.There are tense-prominent and aspect-prominent languages based on the different degree of prominence(Bhat,1999;Stassen,2003).Cross-linguistically,it is noticeable that tense and aspect are multi-functional,however,there are few studies that conduct systematic researches on this phenomenon and its motivation,which is the core issue to be solved in this study.Linguistic Inventory Typology is originally proposed by Liu(2011,2012,2014,2018),the two core concepts in linguistic inventory typology are mighty category and its expansion.Under the framework and assumption of Linguistic Inventory Typology,this thesis tries to find answers for the following four questions:(1)the presentation of mightiness of tense and aspect and its universals cross-linguistically;(2)the specific expansion paths of mighty-aspect;(3)the specific expansion paths of mighty-tense;(4)analyze the motivation behind the expansion effect of mighty-aspect and mighty-tense.Cross-linguistically,the mightiness of aspect and tense can be represented by the following universal features: the mighty aspect or tense is marked by highly grammaticalized forms,but the expressive means is limited to different morphological types of languages,the mighty category is generally marked by the verbal suffixes or prefixes in inflectional and agglutinative languages,while in analytic languages,they are marked by clitics,particles or free morphemes.However,all of these mighty markers are systematic with inflexible paradigm and pervasive distribution.The mighty aspect and tense both have the tendency to expand to non-mighty categories,first,the expansion paths of aspect can be summarized as follows:(1)Perfective/perfect can indicate past time reference,while imperfective/imperfect tend to denote present or future.(2)Imperfective/imperfect can be used to express permission,commission and obligation.(3)Perfective/perfect markers are usually used to indicate the speaker’s attitude of the mentioned situation,such as to express deduction,speculation and assumption;in addition to carry the dynamic modality of ability,intention or volition.(4)Perfective/perfect prefers to imply non-firsthand evidentiality,including inference,report and general knowledge.(5)Ergative case is likely to be assigned in the context of a perfective aspect,and nominative case marking in imperfective aspect.Secondly,the expansion paths of mighty tense is illustrated as follows:(1)Past tense can indicate perfective/perfect and epistemic modality,as well as to imply the meaning of non-firsthand evidentiality,especially the expression of inference.Besides,past tense tends to mark counterfactual mood.(2)Present tense markers are usually used to express imperfective/imperfect aspect,firsthand evidentiality and deontic modality like order,command or permission.(3)The future tends to carry the dynamic modality of ability,intention or volition.(4)The mighty tense can also expand to case,represented by the fact that ergative case is likely to be assigned in the context of a past tense,and nominative case in non-past tense.With respect to the motivation behind the expansion effect of mighty tense and mighty aspect,from the perspective of semantic correlation and grammticalization,tense and aspect markers are essentially used to express the external and internal property of a situation,presented by verbs and their arguments syntactically.Modality and evidentiality can indicate temporal properties and they are close to the fields of tense and aspect.The nominal case category is used to mark the relationship between the verb and its subordinate nominal components,naturally,the aspect and tense markers can be used to express modality,evidentiality and case information.Theoretically,this research helps to establish the cross-linguistic types of mightiness and expansion of tense and aspect and provides a a new perspective from mightiness and expansion to explain the multifunctional phenomenon of tense and aspect.Practically,the results of this analysis will give a number of implications and suggestions for second language teaching,as well as computer natural language processing.