Modern Chinese Aspect: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Approach

This paper is intended to explore the meanings，classifications and realizations of aspect in modern Chinese from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The research results show that there are five kinds of aspect in Chinese：prospective aspect，inceptive aspect，progressive aspect，completive aspect and realized aspect.These aspects are realized by grammatical，quasi－grammatical and lexical resources.Grammatical aspects refer to those realized by auxiliary words including zhe，le，guo，laizhe，etc.or by repetitive forms of verbs.Quasi－grammatical aspects refer to those realized by temporal adverbs and verbs such as qilai，xiaqu，etc.Lexical aspects refer to those realized by units or items filling or expounding the element Predicate in the clause.