The Tense and Aspect System of Chinese, English and Korean : Focusing on the present, the past and the future

There are grammatical markers of tense that are obligatory in English and Korean, ho wever, these grammatical temporal forms are absent in Chinese. Although it is uncontrov ersial that Chinese does not morphologically encode tense, there are several other ways in which temporal information can be encoded (Smith&Erbaugh, 2005). Chinese is an aspect system language which marks aspect. On the contrast, English is a tense system languag e which marks tense. In our review of languages considered in this study, the main focus will be on aspect system and tense system which are illustrated by Chinese, English and Korean. The author will illustrate that the tense and aspect system of Chinese is different from that of Korean and English. Our argument in this paper focuses on three categories which can be referred to as the present, past and future. In chapter one, the motive of re search that difference of aspect and tense expression in Chinese, English and Korea was introduced and the course of this research was mentioned. A contrasting study was cond ucted in chapter two. As for contrasting the characteristics of three languages, the author hope that this paper would help to learn Chinese, English or Korean easily.