earticle

영어

This paper delves into some properties of denoting temporality in Chinese in comparison with English and examines how Chinese EFL learners express the temporality of English sentences. For our discussion in this paper, we have conducted a survey of 200 Chinese college students majoring in English. They were asked to translate 12 English sentences into Chinese without adjunctive adverbials exhibiting temporal information. The results of the survey reveal that the subjects employ a variety of grammatical devices such as time adverbials, verbal aspects, future-oriented verbs, and modal verbs to represent temporality. This is mainly attributed to the fact that Chinese is typologically classified as an analytic language in which verbs lack morphological inflection for tense, and is thereby treated as a tenseless language. This in turn will lead to a host of errors in Chinese EFL learners’ language use in English.