The Internal Oppositeness And Neutralization Of Grammatical Aspect

The category of Aspect is an important field of general linguistic research, and it is one of the hottest and most difficult fields in linguistics. Problems in the Aspectual study of English and Chinese include: there is confusion between Grammatical Aspect and Situation; Grammatical Aspect is treated as appendage to the Verb; Little consideration has ever been contributed to the oppositeness of the system of Grammatical Aspect; and the syntagmatic relations between Markers of Grammatical Aspect have never been advanced to the theoretical level.The author, with the perspective of linguistic typology and by applying Theory of Prominence and Intersecting Theory of Aspectual Meaning, aims to discuss the internal oppositeness and neutralization of Grammatical Aspect in English and Chinese. Based on linguistic typology, English is argued to be a Tense-prominent language and Chinese an Aspect prominent language; based on semantic feature-oppositeness and view distribution-oppositeness, a new system of classification of Grammatical Aspect category is constructed both for English and Chinese; and with the co-occurrence and substitution of aspectual markers as the breakthrough point, a theoretical system of Opposition and Neutralization is firmly established, and the internal mechanism of neutralization (including paradigmatic neutralization and syntagmatic neutralization) is probed into; and the differences of typology, internal oppositeness and neutralization of Grammatical Aspect in English and Chinese are summarized and analyzed on the level of nationality cognition. The dissertation includes six chapters.Chapter One defines what is Grammatical Aspect, marks off Grammatical Aspect and neighboring terms such as Tense, Aktionsart and Situation. Based on the review of English and Chinese aspectual study, problems are disclosed and the research direction and approaches of this dissertation are defined.Chapter Two argues, based on the Theory of Prominence, that English is a Tense-prominent language, while Chinese is an Aspect-prominent language. Some aspectual concepts in English may be expressed through Tense, while some temporal meanings in Chinese may be implied by Aspect. And this implication is termed "time reference function" of Grammatical Aspect. The theoretical foundation of "time reference function" is the "Theory of Intersecting between Situation Structure and Grammatical Aspect". Through application of Prominence and Intersecting theories, the puzzles in the study of Chinese Tense-and-Aspect can be neatly resolved, and the grammatical system of Chinese can be properly simplified.In Chapter Three, based on the Intersecting Theory, Aspect category in Chinese and English is ontologically classified. To achieve this, the author, by combining the analysis of semantic-feature oppositeness and the analysis of prototypical view-diagram, argues that the Perfect construction in English is indeed the Perfective and the Progressive construction is actually the Imperfective in terms of grammar. Chinese, as an Aspect-prominent language, presents a more fine classification of Aspect, with the Perfective subcategorized into the Continuative and the Disconnective, and the Imperfective subcategorized into the Progressive and the Durative. The aspectually unmarked forms in Chinese also show a more complicated situation than those in English. So establishing the Neutral Aspect in Chinese is not only helpful but necessary.Chapter Four finds the author venturing into markedness and oppositeness of Grammatical Aspect. On the basis of the Theory of Markedness, the author establishes the internal opposition modes Grammatical Aspect, and these are Mode of Equipollent Opposition (MEO) and Mode of Privative Opposition (MPO). MEO exists on the level of Broad Domain of Grammatical Aspect in both English and Chinese, while MPO exists only in Chinese in both the Narrow and Broad Domain, which is a big difference between the two languages. With corpus as the base and theoretical construction as the train of thought, the author constr...