Abstract
This article analyses the aspectual system of (Mandarin) Chinese from the perspective the Two-component theory of aspect, originally put forward by Carlota S.Smith (1991/1997) based on Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar and the Trubetzkoy-Jakobsonian notion of Markedness, and subsequently revised and extended by Yang (1995), Xiao & McEnery (2004), and Németh (2012), among many others. Specifically, it explores how Situation type aspect and Viewpoint aspect—the two basic components that make up an aspectual system—are organized, linguistically encoded, and interact with each other to express the aspectual meaning of a sentence in Modern Chinese. The analysis reveals that Chinese, as a tenseless language, possesses a rich and complex aspectual system that comprises five basic-level situation types and four viewpoints: two perfectives and two imperfectives; consequently, the aspectual system of Chinese conforms to the Universal Grammar schemata proposed by Smith in her two-component aspectual model.
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