Chinese Tense: A Systemic Functional Approach

Whether there is tense or not in Chinese has been widely discussed from the perspective of traditional grammar.This paper is intended to explore the Chinese tense system and its instantiation within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics，and its aim is to present a relatively comprehensive and systematic description of tense in Chinese.This study shows that there is tense in Chinese，and that tense in Chinese falls into two types—one being marked in form and the other being unmarked in form.Marked Chinese tenses are realized by grammatical，quasi-grammatical and lexical resources，and the meanings of unmarked ones can be judged from the use of Predicator in the clause.In addition，context plays a role in judging tense.