The Expression Of Future Tense In Chinese

The future tense is a part of tense system. From the viewpoint of absolute tense, if a event happened after the saying time, we could say it happened in the future, which is called simple future. From the viewpoint of relative tense, if a event happened after another referent event, we could also say it happened in the future, which is called posterior. The future tense we discuss here includes both the simple future and the posterior.This article analyses the expression of the future tense in Modern Chinese from the angle of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We find that Chinese future tense is expressed by the grammatical forms, the lexical meaning and the context together. There is no special grammatical form for Chinese future tense. Some grammatical forms ,the verbal reduplication for example, can express the future tense but they might be restricted by some qualification. Lexical means is the primary manner to express Chinese future tense. Temporal none, temporal adverb and temporal structure all can indicate the relative location of the event with the saying time or another referent event on the temporal axes, which represent the function to express the simple future and the posterior. Any means of expression has its pragmatic competence, so the genre, the context and the main body of the pragmatics have great effect with the expression of Chinese future tense.This article adopts reduction of research method. On the base of depicting and analyzing a lot of examples of Modern Chinese, we outline the frame of Chinesefuture tense and show the constitute system.