Previous research on Chinese tense indicates that Chinese has either null tense or no tense. However, the present study suggests that the conclusions of previous studies regarding Chinese tense are either against the syntactic truth or illogical. The present study provides new evidence to support that Chinese has two independent tense elements, zai and guo , which clearly indicate present and past tense, contrary to the traditional assumption that they are aspectual markers. From the perspective of grammaticalization, both zai and guo witnessed grammaticalization from the spatial concept to the temporal concept. The semantic evidence shows that zai and guo are semantically different from the aspectual markers zhe and le and convey the meaning of time location. The fact that both zai and guo are allowed in negation but not permitted in non-finite structure provides syntactic evidence that they are tense markers. However, the present study also suggests there can be two different zai and guo ; zai and guo used separately and independently and zai and guo used with zhe and le. In the latter case, zai is a time adverbial and guo is an aspectual marker. The existence of independent tense markers in Chinese also shows that Chinese may have at least four different mechanisms to anchor tense.

中文翻译：

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中文确实有独立的时态元素

先前对汉语时态的研究表明，汉语时态为空时态或无时态。但是，本研究表明，先前关于汉语时态的研究结论要么违反了句法真理，要么违背了逻辑。本研究提供了新的证据来支持汉语具有两个独立的时态元素zai和guo，这清楚地表明了现在和过去时态，这与传统的假设是时态标记相反。从语法化的角度来看，z和郭都目睹了从空间概念到时间概念的语法化。语义证据表明zai和guo在语义上与方面标记zhe和le不同，并传达了时间位置的含义。否定中允许zai和guo的事实，但在非有限结构中不允许的事实，提供了语法上的证据，表明它们是紧张的标记。但是，目前的研究还表明，可能存在两个不同的zai和guo。ai和郭分别和独立使用，and和郭与and和勒一起使用。在后一种情况下，zai是时间状语，而guo是方面标志。汉语中独立时态标记的存在还表明，汉语可能至少具有四种锚定时态的机制。