The Aspect Of Contemporary Chinese And The Serial Verb Construction Of Serial Action

Serial verb construction is the unique sentence pattern in Chinese, and the serial verb construction of serial action is the most typical one in serial verb construction. This paper is based on the analysis and description of the serial verb construction of serial action, we also explain it in the terms of transformational generative grammar and the cognitive functional grammar.The first part, we analyze the relationship between actions and time by using the cognition of time. In our opinion, the full modality of actions includes two aspects: one is that the actions which correspond .to the temporal section have the inception , duration , termination, on the other hand, the actions which correspond to the temporal point have only inception, termination. Under the distribution theory of structural grammar, we classify the verbs into four types : static- verb, pre-definite verb, post-definite verb, durative verb. The latter three types can indicate actions, pre-definite verb has only the prominence semantic features, post-definite verb has only the finishing semantic features, and serial verb has the both..The second part, we analyze the aspect mark in contemporary Chinese. Under the classification of the modality of the verbs and the functional grammar, the transformational generative grammar, we classify the aspect into two types: typical and non-typical. Each is then divided into six. And the non-typical one is representedby result complement verb phrase and reduplicative verbs. We finally get 26 sorts of aspect in all as the major study objects.The third part, we analyze the serial verb construction of serial action by putting it into the serial-verb-predicate pattern. According to the classifies of the tense-aspect, and in the terms of transformational generative grammar, we get 37 types, 26 sorts, 222 the serial verb construction of serial action in all. And then we summarize the freedom degree of each type of tense-aspect get into the pre-pattern and post-pattern. At last, we analyze the serial verb construction of serial activity patterns which are interposed by negative.