Past Tense?

[bossidy]

A sentence & translation from an Anki deck:

他的父母和姐姐都是被恐怖分子杀害的。

His parents and sister were all murdered by the terrorists.

As a purely grammatical issue, shouldn't this be "His parents and sister are being murdered by the terrorists." or does 被 convey some suggestion that it happened in the past?

[renzhe]

Strictly speaking, there are no tenses in Chinese. You can often convey the same ides through aspect particles, but there is no one-to-one mapping.

被 is only the passive marker and has no temporal connotations. The important grammatical concept here is the 是...的 construction. This is not a regular sentence, it's a 是...的 sentence.

是...的 construction an be used to explain the state or property of something. Since the state (being dead) is described through the action of being killed, the past tense is implicit.

Here is a quote from a stickied thread:

Anonymoose makes a very interesting point, which is the fact that this construction is always (or nearly always?) used to convey past actions. A year ago or so, I used to think that both 我是昨天來的 and *我是明天去的 were both acceptable sentences until a Chinese friend pointed out that the latter is wrong because 是 (...) 的 is always perceived as a past action. In sentences with a future reference, a plain 是 should be used, just as Anonymoose mentioned: 我是明天到.

[chengwenzhao]

Renzhe is completely right.There isn't obvious signs in Chinese which experss tenses.You have to put it into whole sentence to have a general idea about tense.It's difficult at first,but if you consist on doing it,you will be better and better.

他的父母和姐姐都是被恐怖分子杀害的。

In this sentence,"被.....杀害” equals to "were killed",and YES,"背“ does hint the action happened in the past.But it not to all sentences.

As to “杀害” ,it can't be used in any forms of continuous tenses.It means you can't say"恐怖分子正在杀害他的父母和姐姐“,that rubbish Chinese.

Hope it is useful.

[JenniferW]

For anyone interested in tense and aspect in Chinese I'd recommend this article:

http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/acl/C/C02/C02-1031.pdf

If that link doesn't work, search for 'The Chinese aspect system and its semantic interpretation', an article by Guowen Yang and John A Bateman.