Der Aspekt

Abstract

As is the case with most grammatical terms, and with those of other scientific fields as well, they are understood and applied by many individual grammarians individually, and hence differently. Although all grammarians on Chinese agree that the Chinese language uses verbal particles expressing certain grammatical and semantic features, they disagree upon what sorts of particles exist and, consequently, what particles belong to what sorts. Many grammarians are of the opinion that the Chinese language uses the grammatical category aspect to express a special view of action, but they disagree upon what kind of markers, or particles, can be considered aspectual ones.

Two problems arise from these disagreements. The first one is that there is no conceptual accord. Some grammarians use to plainly call the phenomenon aspect just what it is: aspect; some summon up the verbal particles under the generic term auxiliary words indicating the development of an action; others cannot make out any aspect in the Chinese language at all, and thus simply call its markers tense particles. The boldest among all these grammarians do not see any difference between aspectual markers and intonational ones: they mix them all up.

The second problem emerges from the first one, as a consequence. Since there is no clear definition of what constitutes the nature of the aspect in Chinese and how it is expressed verbally, the grammarian who acknowledge the existence of the aspect in the Chinese language agree only on the smallest common denominator, namely that the particles guo, zhe and le are aspect markers. Otherwise, they all have an aspectual concept of their own. Therefore, it is of no surprise that some grammarians distinguish only three forms of the aspect, while other trace as much as nine, as shown above.

Unless only but one concept of the aspect is agreed upon, each grammarian is free to consider, within certain limits, verbal expressions with a marker attached to them an aspect or not. But since the essence of the aspect is how one views a certain action, this one aspectual concept will be hard to come by.