Tense in Mandarin Chinese Sentences

Abstract

J. Lin (2010) argues against Sybesma's (2007) proposal that Mandarin Chinese has syntactic tense and contends that it does not need tense for the temporal interpretations of sentences. This paper shows that those arguments cannot be sustained. Specifically, this paper points out the following: (i) Lin's claim that Mandarin Chinese sentences do not show tenserelated syntactic properties is wrong. (ii) The so-called nonexistent temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences are merely a matter of choice of the reference time. (iii) Lin's argument against the existence of past tense in Mandarin Chinese is committed to the error of taking the English past tense as the only model for the tense system of Mandarin Chinese. (iv) The parallelism between Dutch and Mandarin Chinese that Sybesma observes is temporal in nature, despite the objections of Lin. (v) The temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences can be accounted for straightforwardly by a pronominal tense system. I am grateful to Katherine Hsiao and the participants of my syntax seminars at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, for valuable comments and suggestions. I am also thankful to Tomohiro Fujii for help with the Japanese data. I am responsible for any remaining error.

Contradictory (forward) lifetime effects and the non-future tense in Mandarin Chinese

“…Until recently, theoretical discussions of the Chinese tense system largely focused on whether or not the system is tenseless or has a covert past tense. Arguments from both sides rely mainly on indirect evidence, such as whether there is a finiteness distinction in Chinese (T. H. Lin, 2015;Grano, 2014), which is in fact neither sufficient nor necessary for a Tense Phrase (see for example, Grano 2017). Most notably, J. W. Lin (2006) argues that not only does Chinese have no morphological tenses, but there is "no need to resort to covert features under an empty tense node" in the syntax of Chinese (p. 49).…”

“…However, in Sybesma's proposal, it is unclear what exactly the feature of the tense node is if it is not a temporal one. Additionally, T. H. Lin (2011Lin ( , 2015 demonstrates that there is indeed a Finite/Non-finite contrast in the clausal complements of modals in Chinese, which makes object fronting possible only if it is from a finite clause (as in 4a), but impossible if it is from a non-finite clause (as in 4b):…”

“…( This shows that object fronting in Chinese is sensitive to the finiteness property of the clause, which, according to T. H. Lin (2015), may come directly from a tense node. That said, the finiteness property does not entail the existence of a T node; nor does it inform us of the specific tense system that Chinese may possess.…”

Identifying Chinese dependent clauses in the forms of subjects

“…So far, various efforts have been made to identify the properties of an independent (or ''finite'') clause in Chinese (Huang 1982;Li 1990;Tang 1990;Gu 2007;Tsai 2008;Lin 2011Lin , 2015Grano 2013, among others). In these studies, it is the properties of predicates that are focused on.…”

Mandarin -guo Under Control: An Experimental Study

“…Although Mandarin does not have tense morphology, there is a heated debate in the literature as to whether Mandarin has covert tense. For affirmative view, seeTsang (1981),Li ( , 1990,Simpson & Wu (2002),Sybesma (2007),Tsai (2008), T.-H. J Lin (2012Lin ( , 2015,Sun (2014),. N. Huang (2015),Law & Ndayiragije (2017), among others.…”