An Overview of Researches in Mandarin Chinese Aspect

Abstract

The objective of this research was summarizing the development of Mandarin Chinese Aspect research and attempting to propose Mandarin Chinese Aspect classifying method. The Chinese Aspect development research can be roughly divided into 2 periods: the exploration period of Chinese Aspect study, 1924-1980; and the development period of Mandarin Chinese Aspect, 1981-current. According to mentioned scholars’ research, we can determine our definition on Chinese Aspect as the various way of observing state and flow of event or action on the time line. Simply said, how the event or action changes. Chinese Aspect is the combination between lexical aspect or verb and grammatical aspect or aspect marker which shows different process of action. Thus, Study of Chinese Aspect should consider 2 factors: lexical aspect, relying on Carlota S. Smith (1997) aspectual concept, we divided verbs into five groups: state, activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive; the second factor is grammatical aspect, according to basic aspectual concept of Zhang Zhigong (1982), we grouped aspect markers into four categories: neutral state, start-to-finish state, start-to-non-finish state and non-start-to-non-finish state. Because classification of lexical aspect determines the usage of grammatical aspect, so study of combination between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect are necessary.