The Tense And Aspect Of Ba-Sentences

Ba-sentences are peculiar to modern Chinese. As one of the most important sentence patterns in modern Chinese, it always draws much attention from foreign and domestic researchers in the field of modern Chinese grammar, and thus has already made a lot of outstanding achievements. However, the existing research results seldom relate a Ba-sentence to the tense and aspect of its verb. That is exactly the theme of this paper. In this paper, we display and observe the different ways expressing the tense and aspect of Ba-sentences and their deep-rooted correlation with the structure and meaning of Ba-sentences.At first, this paper displays and observes all of the techniques expressing the tense and aspect of Ba-sentences:1) Verb plus Tense Auxiliary Word, including V-Zhe,V-Le, V-Qilai, V-Xiaqu, V-Guo.2) The Quantity Category, mainly the time-quantity phrases, expressing the frequency of an action, the duration of an action and the duration after the completion of an action, and by way of this, indicating the tense and aspect of Ba-sentences; and A Ba B Yi V, indicating the Instant Aspect.3) The Result Category, largely the Result Complement and the result meaning of the Orientation Complement, indicating the Perfect.Then, this paper elaborates on the interior mechanism of the tense-and-aspect expressing system of Ba-sentences, based on the classification of the Ba-sentence-friendly verbs and the description of these verbs’temporal construction. Besides, after observing and analyzing the utilization mechanism of the adverbials and the overlapping mechanism of the verbs in Ba-sentences, this paper defines them as the tense and aspect compensation mechanism of Ba-sentences. Together, the interior mechanism and compensation mechanism work as the tense-and-aspect expressing system of Ba-sentences.At last, this paper concludes:1) the key factor which decides whether a verb is acceptable in a Ba-sentence is its temporal construction;2) the decisive factors that restrict the expression of tense and aspect in Ba-sentences are the verb’s meaning and people’s different viewpoints towards the tense-and-verb features presented in Ba-sentences.