De l’espace au temps : la grammaticalisation de l’aspect en chinois

Résumé

This paper examines the grammaticalization of aspect markers in Chinese, focusing on their historical development from spatial elements expressing location or motion. Unlike Germanic and especially Romance languages, in which tense and aspect are combined in verbal inflection, Chinese is generally analyzed as lacking overt morphological tense marking in its verbal system. As a result, Chinese could be an ideal case for examining aspect independently of tense morphology. Drawing on diachronic corpus data from classical Chinese sources, this study provides empirical evidence that, compared with Germanic and Romance languages, which have a long research tradition in linguistics, Chinese has developed a greater number of aspect markers from locative or motion expressions. Therefore, this study can deepen our understanding of the extent to which space contributes to the development of the aspectual system and, more broadly, to the expression of temporality in human languages, thereby providing further insights into the close relationship between space and time.