Ways of expression of verbal aspect in German and in Chinese

• Main Authors: Yang, Hui-chung, 楊慧中
• Other Authors: Chang, San-lii
• Format: Others
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50445077191774026716

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 德國語文學系 === 88 === In Slavic, aspect belongs to the field of verbal grammatical category. It expresses the perfective aspect and imperfective aspect through derivation. German and Chinese do not have this type of system; therefore, they represent the field of aspect with different ways. As far as lexical and morphologic expression is concerned, the primary method to represent durative aktionsart in German and Chinese is basic verbs self. German expresses perfective aktionsart mainly through derivation, which is formed by the verbs with a series of prefixes (e.g. ver-, er- ,etc.) or halfprefixes (e.g. ab-, aus-, an-, etc.). Chinese presents perfective meaning by means of some complements of result, such as dao到, zhu住, wan完, and some complements of direction, such as shang上, xia下, qu去. As for the expression in Syntax in German, the prefective aspect is presented mainly by present perfect tense and functional verb structure; while in Chinese, it is presented mainly by verbal particles, where le了 is a typical mark for perfective aspect, guo過is the sub-class of perfective aspect which represents experience aspect, and qilai起來 represents both ingressive and egressive aspects. The verbal particle zhe著as in imperfective aspect, being a typical mark, presents a continuous situation or an action in process. The imperfective aspect in German is usually unmarked; however, it can present a processing meaning through functional verb structure, the progressive form(e.g. am Kochen sein,beim Lesen sein) and the sentence structure "dabei sein, zu".