ABSTRACT
Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a situation denoted by a verb phrase is presented or viewed with regards to its temporal feature. Commonly occurring and widely discussed aspectual distinctions include perfective and imperfective, durative and non-durative, inceptive and completive, and progressive and non-progressive aspects. These distinctions are commonly expressed in languages. This chapter takes a discourse – functional approach to the study of aspect by examining its role in Chinese narrative structure. Focus is given to the perfective and imperfective aspect. It shows that aspect, as a grammatical phenomenon, functions as a grounding device in narrative discourse. The perfective aspect, which presents events in their entirety, records and highlights major events, putting them in the foreground; these events form the main developmental line of a story. The imperfective aspect, which presents ongoing and unbounded events, demotes situations into the background. These clauses play a supporting role in the thematic development of the story, adding descriptions, elaborations and comments. Aspectual choices thus reflect the narrator’s decision to package the information and tell a story from a certain perspective in order to achieve a particular goal.
