Wot no tense?

[smithsgj]

It's silly to talk of *tense* in Chinese. There are lots of ways to convey time, it's not impoverished or something. You can anything you want to say in Chinese (or in any language).

But tense... just doesn't exist. No such paradigm.

To work, boys and girls.

[sunyata]

Well, I sort of agree with you in the sense that Chinese doesn't have different past or future verb tenses (do-did-done-will do), but that doesn't mean Chinese does not have tenses at all. What about particles “过” and "了"? You can say that when they are used to refer to time, they essentially change the sentence into a different tense...

[beirne]

了 is an indicator of aspect. In its post-verb form it indicates either completion or quantification, depending on whose grammar book you read. I happens to coincide with past tense a lot, but lots of past tense sentences don't have it.

[ala]

了 is more typically used as an initiative. Because of that, it seems to be often in the past tense. You need to cut time into two parts, one before the start of the action, and one after. 我吃了 refers to time since the start of eating up to the present. It just shows that the action of eating has been initiated. Prior to that, there was no "eating." More examples: 开始了 (it has started)、饭还没有吃了 (haven't eaten yet; ie. the initiation of eating has not occurred yet). It's wrong to consider 了 as specifically a past tense, though it does correlate with the English present perfect tense quite often. Because it serves as an initiative, 我吃了 can convey the progressive as well, to mean "i have been eating" (present perfect progressive) rather than "i have eaten." It can also serve as a present initiative: 他现在能吃了 = he can now eat. Also because it is an initiative, 我吃了 can also be future as "i will eat now", in this case "eating" will be conducted at a very near future point, and before that there was no eating.

But when you have two 了, as in 他吃了晚饭了. The last 了 serves as the initiative that I have been talking about. But the 了 after the verb serves as a past tense aspect. In isolated Wu dialects, the initative is 来 (lei) and the past particle is 拉 (la), supporting the theory of separate etymologies for the two 了 in Mandarin. 他吃了晚饭了 = 其吃拉夜饭来。

There are other patterns and it gets very complicated. But generally, 了 is initiative and tense inspecific (perfect, present perfect, present perfect progressive, present, and future).

[geek_frappa]

resultative verb compounds make some phrases funny. for example, in chinese, you KILL someone but they don't have to necessarily DIE. you can LOOK, but it doesn't mean you must SEE.

in this sense, cause and effect or try and result make a lot of the language timeless. almost like a constant struggle to find resolution.

i dunno.

[wix]

The question is almost as stupid as asking the question "does Chinese have grammar". Amazingly some of my friends in Taiwan have tried to tell me that it doesn't. Chinese does have tenses, but it is not essential to use them all the time as it is in English and other languages.

e.g. In English it is completely incorrect to say "yesterday I go to school" but in Chinese it is unnecessary to modify the verb in this statement as it is clear from the context.

[geek_frappa]

e.g. In English it is completely incorrect to say "yesterday I go to school" but in Chinese it is unnecessary to modify the verb in this statement as it is clear from the context.

a lot of Americans don't speak English GOOD. you would be surprised.

just please i am begging learners of Chinese: don't say,

WO CHI LE FAN.

it's incomplete and feels strange.

it's like me say this:

AFTER I EAT FOOD....... (......) .....

uhhhh.... then what?

[smithsgj]

了 is an indicator of aspect. In its post-verb form it indicates either completion or quantification, depending on whose grammar book you read. I happens to coincide with past tense a lot, but lots of past tense sentences don't have it.

Yes, 了 is aspectual. Nothing to do with tense.

But in your last sentence you confuse past tense with past time. In what sense is 我昨天去北京, for example, past tense? Or present tense? It doesn't have a tense. What about if I say just 我去北京 without a time adverbial, or any context? What "tense" is that?

English has a few verbs like 'cut' and 'put' where the present tense form is the same as the past. The only way to account for supposed tense in Chinese is to pretend that *all* verbs are like cut and put: present tense 去, past tense 去...

Take this English sentence: "The train leaves at 10 o'clock tomorrow". Quite a common construction -- clearly the present tense, clearly talking about future time. Tense and time: two different things.

[smithsgj]

Thanks Ala for your explanation. Do people sometimes say "inchoative" where you use "initiative", or is that something else?

I've been looking at Li & Thompson (1981). Anyway else got this book? It's pretty insistent that Chinese doesn't have a tense feature (that's the mainstream view in linguistics, by the way, Wix); and the sentence-final 了, it says, is an aspect particle denoting current relevance.

post-verb -le it describes as perfective aspect.

[smithsgj]

Wix, I'm sorry you didn't like my question. Next time, would you prefer I check with you before posting?

It would indeed be strange to assert that Chinese or any language lacks a grammar. Grammar is the set of rules that allow you to string the words together to form sentences.

Also part of grammar is inflectional morphology. This is the set of rules that change word forms (in English, usually, the word-endings) to fit particular grammatical contexts. Chinese doesn't have very much in the way of inflectional morphology, really only 們 and, arguably, the aspect particles we've been talking about.

Probably your friends were not familiar with the term "inflectional morphology", so they said "grammar" instead. Do you really find that "stupid"?

[nnt]

I would agree Chinese grammar has no tense . But tense is not the only way to express time. Each language have a way of expressing time, many languages do not have tense...

French has the notion of feminine/masculine words and endings, which is inexistent in English and rare in Chinese. Does it imply that French is a sexually-oriented language or (what concerns us more) that English and Chinese are sexually-repressive languages?

[smithsgj]

nnt exactly.

I'm interested in what you mean by grammatical gender being "rare in Chinese". Some languages, notably African ones, make use of grammatical categories like "animate" and "inanimate", and linguists often refer to this as a gender distinction.

By extension, some have suggested, any means of classifying nouns (like Chinese measure words 量詞) should be considered a form of gender classification. I'm not convinced by that, though, because no other feature of the language (like adjective agreement) relies on it.

[nnt]

nnt exactly.

I'm interested in what you mean by grammatical gender being "rare in Chinese".

tatata!他她它

[ala]

他她它 was an artificial creation to the characters to avoid ambiguity in writing a hundred years or so ago. The actual morpheme was just 它. 它 became used to refer specifically to the Christian god, and 他 became used as he/she or others. Finally 她 was created for she specifically, also due to Western influence. This is a good example of the writing system creating two notions from what was originally a neuter pronoun. Now we think of "ta" as "homophones" for he, she, it instead. In Taiwan and Hong Kong 妳 is now often used too. East Asian languages did not originally have gender in personal pronouns.

Also 他 was not commonly used until Western influence. The term had very strong connotations of "other people", "aliens", "not within my clan"... In Japanese too, 彼 and 彼女 are recent modern adaptations for he and she, and still considered impolite.

[wix]

Wix, I'm sorry you didn't like my question. Next time, would you prefer I check with you before posting?

No need to check with me. You can post any question you like. My meaning is just that the answer to the question is obviously "yes". Although the posts here seem to reveal that the answer is "yes, but..."

Probably your friends were not familiar with the term "inflectional morphology", so they said "grammar" instead. Do you really find that "stupid"?

Well, actually my friends were speaking in Mandarin when they said this. I am not familiar with the term for "inflectional morphology" in Chinese but it is not what they said. Funnily enough they were even more convinced that Taiwanese doesn't have grammar. It really just reflects there education. They have spent an inordinate amount of time studying English grammar therefore they know it exists. However, they have never formally studied the grammar of their native languages so they assume it has no grammar.

I agree about the "le" particle. Many people mistakenly say it represents past tense but of course its function is entirely different. You will still find some books (particularly phrasebooks) about Chinese saying that "le" is used for past tense. Hence the myth gets perpetuated.

[smithsgj]

Wix makes the valid point that people don't recognize structure or patterns in their own language. Chinese learners of English are exposed to grammatical patterns in English, but not to those of Chinese, so they assume such patterns are absent. Wix's friends probably would claim too that the Taiwanese tone system is incoherent and 亂七八糟 but the Mandarin scheme makes sense because they learnt it at school.

Actually they could have meant inflectional morphology when they said grammar, I think, but let's let that go.

Now, these students would have to agree with me that Chinese has no tense, because they believe there's no grammar and tense is part of grammar.

But can't you see that while *obviously* every language has grammar (it has to have, in order to qualify as a language), *not* every language has tense. Just like (as nnt said) not every language has gender. Chinese is a language that has neither. Nor does it have a subjunctive mood. It does have resultative compounds, while English is a language that does not (much). All languages have a different set of grammatical paradigms, that's all.

Are we all at least agreed that 'le' does not mark tense? And that 過and 著 (or however you write it) do not either?

So how is this supposed tense marked?

Can someone who supports the notion that Chinese has tense please justify their view by responding with a list of the tenses, and supply a Chinese translation of the sentence "I go to Beijing" in each of them? Without relying on 了. Thanks.

[nnt]

Has any Chinese schoolboy/girl had to conjugate a verb?