Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles

Jian Kang Loar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351257664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese plays an important role in interpreting the temporal information of a sentence. It is an important verbal category, which is concerned with the speaker's viewpoint or perspective on a situation: whether the situation is presented as complete (perfective aspect) or as ongoing (imperfective aspect), etc. Learning to understand the aspect particles or markers, and use them correctly, has always been one of the most difficult tasks for learners of Chinese.

Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles is a pedagogical guide designed to equip teachers with necessary aspectual theoretical knowledge, and is aimed at in-service or trainee teachers, and intermediate or advanced students to reinforce teaching and learning. Challenging exercises are designed and explanations for the correct use of an aspect particle are given, thus making the book more useable and convenient to teachers and enhancing the practical reference value of the book.

1 Basic background knowledge

1.1 The definition of aspect

This book is devoted to a detailed and systematic discussion of aspect in Mandarin Chinese. Aspect is an important linguistic category and it plays a role as important as tense but different from tense in the interpretation of the temporal information contained in a sentence. Chinese language learners perhaps are not familiar with the concept of aspect, though they may know the function words ‘-le’ or ‘-guo’ when they learn to say some Chinese sentences. ‘-le’ and ‘-guo’ are just two frequently used aspect particles. They are indispensable grammatically when you tell your friends what you did, where you went over the weekend, like ‘wǒ kàn le yí gè diànyǐng’ (I saw a movie). Broadly and simply speaking, aspect is concerned with whether an action is completed or not, or whether an action is going on or not. The Chinese language is recognized as an aspect language, it has a rich inventory of aspect particles or markers. Therefore, it is necessary to take account of aspect markers in Chinese when interpreting almost any Chinese utterance.

Students are usually not so familiar with the term ‘aspect’ as they are with the term ‘tense’. Therefore, before we start to discuss the concept of aspect, we should compare it with the meaning of the more familiar term ‘tense’.

1.1.1 The general cover term ‘situation’

Before we discuss the semantic concepts of tense and aspect, we need first to be clear about the term ‘situation’, because in our discussion it is often necessary to refer to the differences between States, events, and processes, thus we will use the term ‘situation’ as a general cover term, that is to say, a situation may be either an event, State, or a process. An event is active, for instance, ‘A thief stole my car’, the verb ‘stole’ describes an event that is controlled and carried out, and the event of stealing consists of a series of actions that result in the stealing of the car; and the event has a distinct effect on the participants (the one who suffered from the stealing, and the car) involved. States, on the contrary, are uniform, unchanged and static. For instance, ‘my car cost $18,000’, the verb ‘cost’ expresses a State. The State remains, or continues as before, when the car was not stolen, not that it has come to that price through a sequence of actions. Processes consist of a series of subprocesses that are viewed in progress or viewed as going on at the moment of speaking. Both events and processes are dynamic in the sense that they require a continual input of energy if they are not to come to an end. By contrast, States are static, they do not need energy to remain as they are. The difference between event and process is that an event is viewed as a complete whole, whereas the latter is regarded as unfolding over time (Comrie, 1976).

1.1.2 The concept of ‘tense’

Speakers of European languages are familiar with the semantic concept of tense. Tense relates the time of the occurrence of a situation to some other time, usually to the moment of speaking when the situation is brought up in conversation. In most languages that have the grammatical category of tense, three tenses – present, past, and future, are distinguished. The present tense is used for a situation that is located as simultaneous with the moment of speaking (e.g. Peter is reading now); a situation described in the past is located prior to the moment of speaking (e.g. Peter read an hour ago, Peter was reading yesterday), and a situation described in the future is located after the moment of speaking (Peter will read in the afternoon, Peter will be reading in the evening). Since tense locates situations in time, usually with reference to the present moment, sometimes with reference to other situations, tense is a deictic category.

Aspect is quite different from tense. The difference in English between ‘Tom was reading yesterday’ and ‘Tom read yesterday’ is not one of tense, since in both sentences, past tense is used. The difference lies in such opposition as that between perfective and imperfective which are treated as aspectual in this book. Roughly speaking, aspect is not unconcerned with time, but it is concerned with time in a different way than tense is. Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal structure of a situation: whether the situation is focused or presented as complete or partial or incomplete, or as inceptive, etc. It is not a deictic category as tense, that is, it does not locate situations in time, usually with reference to the present moment, or with reference to other situations. The difference between the two semantic concepts may be summarized as the one between situation-internal time (aspect), and situation external time (tense) (Comrie, 1976).

In languages which have a past tense, it provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past. Some languages that grammaticalize for past tense do so by inflecting the verb. For instance, in English, the past tense is expressed by ‘verb + ed’ or by irregular verbs. Not all languages grammaticalize verbs for past tense. Chinese is recognized as one such language (cf. Comrie, 1976; Smith, 1997: 263; Dai, 1997: 32). Chinese does not have a grammatical category to express the time reference of a situation, so we may say that Chinese does not have tenses. But that does not mean that Chinese lacks the concept for tenses, the temporal reference in Chinese is provided syntactically by time words, that is, Chinese uses temporal adverbials to locate situations in time, such as ‘today, last year, this morning, at five o’clock’, as in ‘Wǒ qùnián huí Zhon̄gguó le’ (I went back to China last year), ‘Wǒ dào jiā yǐhòu, kāishǐ xiàyǔ le’ (After I came back home, it started to rain), etc. Semantically, the temporal reference is given through the relation of situations described in a discourse.

Chinese does not grammaticalize time reference to give tenses, however, Chinese has formal devices like ‘le/guo’ and ‘zhe’ to express semantic aspectual distinctions, such as that between perfective and imperfective meaning. Therefore, Aspect exists as a grammatical category in Chinese.

1.1.3 The concept of aspect

After this brief review of the concept of tense, we are in a better position to understand the semantic concept of Aspect. Aspect, like tense, is also a verbal category.

Aspect does not refer to the time relation between a situation and the moment of its being mentioned in speech, rather, it is about how a situation itself is being viewed with respect to its own internal structure. ‘Aspect is the semantic domain of the temporal structure of situations and their presentation’ (Smith, 1997: 1). Bernard Comrie (1976: 3) in his monograph on Aspect, says that ‘Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’. As for the exact meaning of ‘the internal temporal constituency’, Frawley’s definition provides a clue: ‘It is the way that event is distributed through the time frame in which the event occurs’ (1992: 294), or it is ‘reference to one of the temporally distinct phases in the evolution of an event through time’. Frawley’s definition helps us have a better understanding of ‘the internal temporal constituency’ of an event. Let’s consider an active event. Its internal structure includes the beginning or the initial stage, the middle stage or the process during which the event is/was going on, and the endpoint or the final concluding stage. Roughly, an active event consists of these three phases. How can an event be viewed in different ways? According to Smith (1997): ‘Aspectual viewpoints present situations with a particular perspective or focus, rather like the focus of a camera lens. Viewpoint gives a full or partial view of the situation talked about’. Here Smith compares aspectual viewpoints to the lens of a camera which makes objects visible to spectators. Situations are the objects on which viewpoint lenses operate. Just as the camera lens is necessary to make some objects of a picture visible, so viewpoints are necessary to make visible different phases of a situation mentioned in an utterance. The speaker may adopt different viewpoints to focus on the different phases of a situation: the beginning, the process or the continuation, or the endpoint or completion of the situation. Each of these phases of an event focused on is an aspect that may be selected for emphasis in a conversation.

Despite different treatments of Aspect, the general agreement about its definition is that, Aspect is a matter of the speaker’s viewpoint or perspective on a situation. The speaker may choose to portray an event as complete (perfective aspect) or as ongoing (imperfective aspect), or as beginning (ingressive aspect), continuing (continuative aspect), ending (egressive aspect), or repeating (iterative or habitual aspect) (Brinton, 1988: 53).

The two main types of aspectual viewpoint are the dichotomy of perfective and imperfective aspect. According to Comrie (1976), ‘perfective aspect looks at the situation from outside, without necessarily distinguishing any of the internal structure or its inside; whereas the imperfective looks at the situation from inside, and as such is crucially concerned with the internal structure of the situation’. The perfective looks at a situation as a whole or an entirety, including its beginning, middle, and end, while the imperfective looks at the middle or the continuation of a situation, without including its beginning or end. To make an analogy, we might imagine an event as the endlessly flowing Yangtze River of China, which flows 6,300 kilometres and traverses 10 provinces. The river has its source on the Plateau of Tibet, and its estuary on the East China Sea, and it consists of the upper, middle and lower reaches. In some sections, the river bed is narrow and winding, the current is swift and rapid, while in some other sections, the river bed is wide and straight, the water flows slow, calm and smooth. So, the river is complex. When taking a birds-eye view, looking at it from the air, what we can see is the single whole river, without any distinction of its internal structure. It looks like a winding belt, its source, upper, middle, and lower reaches, and its estuary all rolled into one. Such a viewpoint is like the perfective. On the other hand, we can also look at one section of the river, say, only the upper reach, including its source and its demarcation end in Yichang, Hubei province. If we view the upper reach in its entirety, without paying attention to its detailed structure, such a viewpoint is perfective, too. However, when standing by the river, or being in a boat on the river, we could only see or focus on one part of the river. Its source or its estuary where the river flows into the East China Sea is both beyond our vision. Seeing the part of the river so closely, we can observe the flowing of the river, its current speed, the width of the river bed, and the state of the water: limpid or muddy, etc. Such a viewpoint is like the imperfective. The imperfective viewpoint is open, that is, we can look backwards towards the origin of the river and look forward towards the end of the river.

1.2 Aspectual meaning is compositional

1.2.1 The inherent aspectual meaning of a verb

The aspectual meaning of a sentence is compositional in nature (Verkuyl, 1972), it is carried by the interaction of various linguistic features, including tense, adverbial phrase, noun phrase, verbal type, verbal construction, etc. (Verkuyl, 1972; Comrie, 1976; Lyons, 1977; Freed, 1979, Smith, 1997). But among various factors contributing to the aspectual meaning of a sentence, the main factor is the interaction of verb semantics (Aktionsart) with an aspect particle. Hence in our study, attention will be given to the interaction between the inherent temporal properties of a verb and the grammatical meaning of a formal aspect particle. To learn the usage of Chinese aspect particles, we should first have some knowledge about the semantics of verbs and the classification of verbs.

Verbs have their intrinsic temporal qualities, such as ‘static or dynamic, punctual or durative, bounded or unbounded, continuous or iterative’ (Brinton, 1988: 3). These are a cluster of conceptual temporal properties of ‘dynamism, telicity and duration’ which distinguish verbs or situation types. For instance, verbs ‘shēngzhǎng’ (grow) and ‘chéngshú’ (ripen, mature) describe situations that must inherently last for a certain period of time. Such verbs have the feature of durativity; while some verbs like ‘bàozhà’ (explode), ‘sǐ’ (die) refer to situations that do not last in time (or they are not conceived as lasting in time), rather, they take place momentarily, so verbs of this kind are semantically punctual. In terms of their inherent aspectual properties (namely, the inherent features of dynamism, durativity, and telicity), verbs can be generally classified as four categories: State, Activity, Accomplishment, and Achievement (Vendler, 1967).¹ If the meaning of a verb is punctual, the situation in the real world named by the verb could be said to be punctual, and the verb can be classified as a ‘punctual’ verb. However, we should be aware that though we are talking about the Aktionsart of a verb, in fact, it is very difficult to specify the basic Aktionsart of any verb. One reason is that many times a verb has different shades of meaning and occurs in different structures, which gives rise to differences in its inherent aspectual features. For instance, the verb ‘xiǎng’ (think) in the sentence structure ‘wǒ xiǎng nǐde kànfǎ hěn duì’ (I think that your opinion is right) names a State, while in another sentence ‘wǒ zài xiǎng wǒmen zhè cì de lǚyóu jìhuá’ (I am thinking of our itinerary), it names an Activity. In addition, when we talk about the Aktionsart of a verb, the role played by a nominal argument must be taken into account because most of Accomplishment verbs consist of a verb and an accompanying single or a count object. Thus, we see that situations are not just described by verbs, but by a verb together with its arguments of subject and object. The four verb categories mentioned above can be referred to as situation types. The four situation types based on the inherent aspectual features of verbs are expounded and represented by the temporal schema proposed by Smith (1997).

1.2.2 Four situation types

The conceptual temporal properties possessed by verbs are ‘dynamism, telicity and duration’, which form three contrasting pairs as follows:

• [static/dynamic]: The properties of stasis and motion constitute a fundamental distinction which bifurcates all situation types into two classes: States and events. States are static and they hold or obtain for an indefinite length of time. Events are dynamic. They need energy to take place, to happen and to continue. They are ‘continually subject to a new input of energy’, as Comrie puts it (1976: 49). Events consist of successiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Basic background knowledge
• 2 The perfective aspects in Chinese
• 3 The imperfective aspects in Chinese
• Bibliography
• Index