关键词: 时态; 体; 语法缺失; 失语症

Abstract: There has been a long debate as to whether there is tense in Chinese, an uninflected language. Some scholars hold that there exist only four aspectual morphemes including zhe, guo, zai, and verbal le, serving as time markers while others argue that the past time morpheme guo is in fact a tense marker, indicating that there is tense in Chinese. Without empirical evidence and with only theoretical discussion, the debate can hardly come to any conclusion. Against this background the linguistic studies on syntactic deficits in aphasic agrammatism may have special value since they may provide the empirical evidence helping settle the debate. A longitudinal case study was conducted, aiming at observing the recovery process of a Chinese agrammatic speaker. We examined the production of the above four morphemes by a 52-year-old male patient in a longitudinal study spanning five months. The findings indicate that guo is indeed dissociated from the other aspectual morphemes zhe, zai, and verbal le. This study has provided the empirical evidence that there may be a tense phrase (TP) node in the syntactic tree of the Chinese language, hosting guo, higher than the NegP node, which is in turn higher than the AspP node. Thus it was concluded that there may be tense in the Chinese language. This study, based upon the generative linguistics, provides an innovative perspective in proving hierarchical structure in language.

Keywords: tense; aspect; agrammatism; aphasia