Comparative Analysis: Interactions between the English Past Tense and the Chinese “le” with Aspect and Modality

Abstract

The study of tense, aspect and modality has always played a very important role in language learning, so a deep understanding of the three is helpful for language learners to see the essence of language better. The author observes that most of the existing studies are from tense, voice and modality, respectively and analyze them from different angles, but there are few articles that can combine the three for interactive analysis. Therefore, this paper takes CCL as the main source of corpus, takes the past tense, one of the important tenses in English and the common auxiliary word “le” in Chinese as the main line of research, making a comparative analysis of their interaction with aspect and modality in the past tense expression. It is found that the interaction between the past tense and the aspect in English is mainly realized through the inflection of verbs and the combination of auxiliary verbs, which has a fixed grammatical structure. However, the interaction between Chinese “le” and aspect is relatively flexible, usually with the help of context or time adverbials. In terms of modality, the past tense can be combined with modal verbs to form a fixed expression so that the modality has a direct influence on the expression of the past tense. On the contrary, the modal expression of “le” in Chinese usually relies on modal auxiliary words and adverbs, causing a weak influence on the past tense expression of “le”. This study not only reveals the differences and similarities between English and Chinese time-system expressions, but also provides new insights into language teaching and translation practice.