temporal structure in the verb, expressed by grammatical and lexico-
grammatical forms, such as "tense" and "aspect"; and the method of this
examination will be that of ascertaining how far and in what way such
temporal structure finds expression in Chinese. The approach will be
essentially synchronic, and the type of Chinese to be considered will be
modern Standard Chinese, the spoken language of Peking. Reference
will also be made to other dialects, principally the Dungan dialect,~
which is a sub-dialect of the Mandarin group, and Cantonese. For pur-
poses of comparison, account will be taken of other languages where the
temporal categories are most clearly exhibited, especially,, as regards
aspect, of the Slavonic languages.
  A large amount of work has been done on the study of temporal
expression in Chinese, notably by Prusek (1950: 408-30) who has made
use of extensive comparison with Slavonic languages. It is significant that
some writers on Chinese have denied altogether that Chinese contains
any grammatical form of expressions of time: for instance Maspero
(1937: 6; quoted by Prusek, (1950: 412) has written "Le terme meme de
categorie, avec ce, qu'i1 implique de necessite ineluctable de la penske,
est inacceptable pour les langues ou les faits ... n'apparaissent pas ...
comme des moules obligatoires s'imposant a la penske, mais seulement
comme des nuances facultatives d'expression: on en verra un example a
propos de l'aspect". What grammatical forms there are, Maspero says
later and with explicit reference to aspect, express subjective attitude
rather than any definite system of time-relations.
    A somewhat different view of Chinese was held by earlier philologists
who contrasted its apparent formlessness with the transparently gram-
matical structure of the Indo-European languages: thus Saussure called
Chinese "ultra-lexical", referring especially to classical Chinese where
grammatical relations are expressed lexically, by word order and so on.
More recently, however, this view has been explicitly denied by Frei
(1941: 142) with reference to Modern Chinese: according to Frei, the
Pekingese compound verb system expresses grammatically what in 'our
languages' is expressed lexically, while there is a high degree of coercion
(especially of prohibition) in the Pekingese aspect system.
   The insistence on the absence of strict formal grammatical categories
in Chinese, and thus on the wide gulfseparating Chinese from European
languages, was itself made inevitable in the first place by the approach of
many of the writers of early textbooks on Chinese, who had tried to
mould the Chinese verb into a tense-system based on or taken directly
from that of Latin. This type of classification of Chinese forms without
regard to their function in Chinese grammar still survives in modern
works, in such things as Mullie's tense-scheme of the Chinese verb
(1937/1970), and is referred to by Frei (p. 137) who considers it
necessary to point out the danger of arbitrarily applying to Chinese
grammatical categories taken from other languages.
   It is clear that in order to understand Chinese grammar and the
structure of Chinese as a whole, it is not enough to compare them with
particular modes of expression in particular languages, such as aspects in
Slavonic. It is necessary to derive general principles from an examination
of how languages of all types express possible temporal relations in
the verb. It will then be possible both to analyse Chinese with these
principles as a framework of reference and to compare the Chinese
system as a whole with that of English and other languages, previous
comparisons with which have been less systematic.
   In the realm of the verb, the simplest category for our purposes is that
which has no specific reference to time present, past or future, and which
we may call "neutral": e.g. twice two is four, the earth revolves round the sun,
I go there every week. As opposed to this are the three basic tenses, or
locations in time (relative to the speaker), though these may not be given
separate expression: for instance, the Present is expressed in Russian by
the neutral form, as ya delayu 'I do, I am doing'.
   Each of these, Past, Future, Present (and Neutral), can theoretically
receive a tense-modification or "secondary tense",2 as it were a tense
within a tense, locating the action in relation to the time spoken of,
which the primary tense relates to the time of speaking. Thus there is a

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