Phase in Modern Mandarin Chinese: A Systemic Functional Approach

Previous studies on phase in modern mandarin Chinese have been mainly focused on the verb itself，i.e.they have mainly explored the temporal meaning expressed by the verb itself.In addition，they have not been carried out with in a systematic and comprehensive framework.This paper is intended to make a detailed study of phase in modern mandarin Chinese from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics.It aims to reveal the relationship between clauses representing different types of processes and different types of phase.The research results show that the Predicator in the clause is the basic element expressing the meaning of phase，and that other syntactic elements may play an important role in the construal of phase.