Guo1 and Guo2 in Chinese Temporal System

“Guo1” and “Guo2” in Chinese Temporal System QIU Zhuang, SU Qi * School of Foreign Languages Peking University, China {1301213011,sukia}@pku.edu.cn Abstract This paper aims to investigate the subtle nuances of meaning of two Chinese particles “guo1” and “guo2” as well as their different functions in Chinese temporal system. Two technical terms, “tense” and “aspect”, in traditional Chinese grammar are reconsidered in terms of the nature of these two concepts and the criteria to distinguish them. It is argued that in traditional Chinese grammar, “tense” and “aspect” are often mixed up by scholars, which has misled the study of “guo1” and “guo2”. Contrast to the traditional theory, this paper argues that “guo1” is the marker of the terminative aspect, while “guo2” is the marker of the past tense. Moreover, based on the markedness theory, the semantic and functional differences between “guo1” and “guo2” can be regarded as different usage of the particle “guo” in the unmarked or the marked sense. 1. Introduction Tense and aspect, which share certain similarity but significantly differ in nature, are crucial * Corresponding author concepts in the temporal system of a language. Compared with English grammar, the temporal system of Chinese grammar has a short history and the concept of tense and aspect in Chinese have been confused with each other even by some renowned scholars. This has caused negative consequences in the study related to the grammaticalization of time. It has been widely accepted that three Chinese particles, “zhe” “le” and “guo”, are aspect markers in Chinese. And “guo” can be subdivided into two semantic variants called “guo1” and “guo2”, of which “guo1” has been regarded as expressing a sense of “completeness” and “guo2” has been regarded as the marker of the experiential aspect, which also means the completeness of an action. However, the traditional theory fails to answer questions like “what is the difference between „guo1‟ and „guo2‟ if they both mean „completeness‟ ”, “what is the relation between „guo1‟ and „guo2‟ ” and “what is the nature of „the experiential aspect‟ in Chinese”. This paper attempts to provide answers to all these questions. 2. The concept of tense and aspect in Chinese temporal system. The temporal system of English grammar which draws a clear distinction between tense and aspect has been established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Poutsma (1926) defines “tense” PACLIC 28 568 Copyright 2014 by QIU Zhuang and SU Qi 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 568–574 as the change of verb form in relation to the time during which the action takes place, while “aspect” refers to the property of the action itself, such as being durative or momentary and so on. Jakobson (1984) uses the concept of speech event and narrated event to distinguish tense from aspect. He claims that tense is a concept related to both speech event and narrated event. If the narrated event takes place before the speech event, then the speaker should use the past tense, while if the …

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