A Study On The Completion Of German Temporal Closure

With the development of the German teaching, the number of German learners is increasing. The German learners include German majors, people who want to study further in German speaking countries and who work by using German, as well as German learners who are interested in the German economy and culture. In China, people often choose to learn English as the foreign language. Their learning experiences have made them get used to the English way of thinking. Therefore, people who begin to learn German would like to compare German with English, and use English knowledge to analyze and explain the new language in order to understand German better. Since German and English belong to the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family, there are some similarities between the two. Therefore, German learners often use English to help them study German. But if there is a lack of a correct guidance, the similarities between the two languages will have a negative effect on German learners.Both German and English have the perfect tense. The perfect tense of German has a covert feature of closeness, which can easily lead to grammatical problems. This problem has hardly been mentioned in today’s German textbooks. On the other hand, German teachers have not paid enough attention to the problem caused by using the English perfect tense mechanically while learning German. Therefore, it is necessary to compare the German perfect tense with the English perfect tense based on the analysis of the closed feature of German so as to reduce the negative effect of English on German’s perfect tense learning.This paper is based on "Aspekt-Theorie", Reichenbach’s tense analysis "Zeitparameter" and "Aktionsarten der Verben" of the verbal semantic classification, and sets up a Corpus of example sentences and questionnaires. The aim is to analyze the closed feature of German, the determinants of this feature and different degrees of closeness in different perfect tenses from the perspectives of the tense and the verbal semantics. And the research result will be used to analyze students’questionnaires and find out the determinants of the German perfect tense and put forward some suggestions to the German teaching.This paper includes two parts:the theoretical analysis and the practical use. The first part is the theoretical base of the second part. It contains three chapters:the preface, the theoretical framework and the analysis of the closeness of the German perfect tense. The second part is the continuation of the first one. It includes a comparison of the closeness of the German perfect tense with the continuance of the English present perfect progressive, a questionnaire survey of the closeness of the perfect tense and a false analysis of the survey results as well as the conclusion.The first chapter is introduction. It firstly testifies the significance of this study based on the current situation of German learners in China, secondly reviews the relevant studies, introduces the aim of this study and the problems to be solved, and finally shows the paper structure and the Corpus’s source.The second chapter is the theoretical framework. It has two levels:the first is the tense analysis method of the Aspekt-Theorie and the Aktionsarten der Verben of the verbal semantics. The former focuses on the tense analysis method and the descriptive model of the German perfect tense. The latter concentrates on the perfective and the imperfective features of verbs, as well as the relation between the Aktionsarten der Verben and the Aspekt-Theorie. The third chapter discusses the closeness of the German perfect tense. It firstly analyzes the definition of the closeness of the German perfect tense, then studies its determinants and different degrees of closeness in different perfect tenses and how to disclose it, and finally focuses on the influence of the perfect tense and the Aktionsarten der Verben on the closeness of perfect tenses.The fourth chapter compares the closeness of the German perfect tense with the continuance of the English present perfect progressive, and the German perfect tense with the English perfect tense by using the Aspekt-Theorie. The result is although the English present perfect tense has the closed feature in some instances, this feature is the main difference between the English and the German perfect tense.The fifth chapter is a questionnaire survey of students from four universities to show how the closeness of the German perfect tense and English negatively affect the German perfect tense. There is a comparison of testing scores and a classification of false in the survey result. At the end of the chapter is the false analysis made in two levels:the tense and the Aktionsarten der Verben, and gives some suggestions to the German teaching.The sixth chapter discusses how to reduce the negative effect of English on the German perfect tense from the angles of teaching and learning, and points out that teachers should make full use of the German-English comparison teaching method based on the German learners’ learning features. In this way, English can serve the German teaching well. The Chinese German learners should also become do well in developing their language senses and analysis capabilities by comparing different uses of German and English.The author hopes that this paper can provoke some thoughts on the German perfect tense teaching.