Interpreting Tense In Chinese

The major focus of this thesis is how to reasonably interpret Chinese tense in the framework of Minimalist Program (MP).Based upon the analysis that the previous works that claim there is no tense in Chinese have failed to defend themselves with compelling evidence, the thesis assume that there is tense in Chinese. The Chinese tense has mainly been interpreted in two ways in the recent literature: (i) Chinese tense is lexically realized as several tense markers, which mark past, present or future to a clause; (ii) Chinese tense is a functional category T. It projects with either an empty tense operator on its head or with a phonetically null head but bearing strong nominal features. This thesis observes that both approaches face fatal challenges: the former lacks solid theoretic foundations so it cannot answer the question why some time adverbials, such as zuotian (yesterday), qunian (last year), mintian (tomorrow) cannot be taken as tense markers in Chinese; The latter fails to satisfy any condition of the Visibility Guideline for Functional Categories, which claims that a functional category should bear phonetic content by itself, or influence the morphological shape of its neighboring lexical category or trigger a certain movement.In order to interpret the Chinese tense in a better way and to solve the problems which arise in the previous studies, this thesis is to investigate Chinese tense in the framework of MP, by claiming that tense is a functional category of human language. Tense bears tense and EPP feature and expresses tense/event structure itself. Hence it has a deitic function with respect to VP and it plays a role in the derivation.Within the framework of MP the Chinese tense system is interpreted as this: Chinese tense is a functional category. It projects and the tense projection is labeled as TP. The head of TP is lexically realized as mei or laizhe, both bearing interpretable tense feature [iT], There are two kinds of movements involving tense in Chinese, (i) Verb-le, which is argued to be another functional category v, has the uninterpretable tense feature [uT]. In sentences with verb-le but without mei, the tense feature on T head checks the [uT] on verb-le and triggers a V/v-to-T movement; (ii) When C selects a TP with laizhe as T head, C bears a [uT] and a T-to-C movement is triggered to checked off the [uT].If this interpretation is on the right track, then the difference between Chinese and English tense only lies in their morphology but not in the nature of tense. English verbsare inflectionally tensed while Chinese verbs are not. Tense features on T check the relative features on verbs in English but do not check the relative features on Chinese verbs.The two questions that arise in the previous studies can be solved if we interpret Chinese tense within the framework of MP. Firstly, because Chinese tense is, as is argued, a functional category as tense in other tensed languages (for example, English), the substantive words such as zuotian (yesterday), qunian (last year), mintian (tomorrow) cannot be tense (markers) in Chinese; Secondly, the above interpretation satisfies the Visibility Guideline for Functional Categories better than the interpretations in the previous works.