A Study Of Tense-Aspect System Of Linhai Dialect In Zhejiang Province

Linhai County is one of the central coastal cities in Zhejiang Province,and Linhai dialect belongs to Lin-San area of the Taizhou dialect,the Wu dialect.This paper is devoted to the research on the tense and aspect system of Linhai dialect and the contrast between Linhai dialect and dialects in other regions.The aspect system is divided into two parts,Aspect and State.The change of action or state is a linear time process,which is from not occurring to occurring,then to occurred.From this,any point of the linear time process can be judged as three cases:Weiran Aspect,Zhengran Aspect and Yiran Aspect.The State means the status of action at a particular time during the linear time process.According to different situations,the State can be divided into Short-time State,Durative State and Antecedent State.This paper is separated into five chapters,and the content structure is as follows:The first chapter is the introduction,which mainly introduces the general situation of Linhai County,the research on the tense and aspect system at home and abroad and the definition of the tense and aspect system from the author.Research significance and methods will also be mentioned.Chapter two focus on the Weiran Aspect.There is only one type of the Weiran Aspect,which is named Jiangxing Aspect.Jiangxing Aspect indicates the action is about to occur.In Linhai County,people usually use auxiliary verb "YAO[i(?)]" to express that something is going to happen.They also use aspectual marker "LIAO[li(?)3]" to achieve this.Another way is pragmatic approach."SOV+DIAO[(?)]”sentence pattern is used to express this meaning.Zhengran Aspect,which can be divided into two categories,will be introduced in Chapter three.Inchoate Aspect describes the beginning of the action.The aspectual marker of Inchoate Aspect is "LAI[lei]”.The verbs before LAI has three features:having starting point,strong continuation,dynamic and continuous."ZAI[ze13]GE[g(?)]DA[d(?)]" is the aspectual marker of Progressive Aspect.It is the product of grammaticalization of the prepositional phrase which is indicated direction and location.The fourth chapter discusses Yiran Aspect.Yiran Aspect can also be separated into two parts:Perfective Aspect and Experiential Aspect.Perfective Aspect gives prominence to the "realistic relevance" of the action,but Experiential Aspect emphasizes that action has happened."LE[la]" and "DIAO[(?)]" are the aspectual markers of Perfective Aspect,while "GUO[ku]" is the aspectual marker of Experiential Aspect.There are differences between "GUO[ku]" in Linhai dialect and "GUO" in Mandarin in terms of negative sentences,interrogative sentences,etc.Chapter five mainly introduces the State.People in Linhai County use verb reduplication to convey Short-time State.Sometimes they will add auxiliary words after the verb reduplication to express more meanings,such as "KAN/XIANG" "JI" "GUO""QI" and so on.In addition to aspectual marker "GE DA",people also use other three methods to describe the action is going on.In chapter six,the classification and characteristics of the tense and aspect system of Linhai dialect will be summed up in a simple way.