# Representing Aspectual Meaning in Sentence: Computational Modeling Based on Chinese
## 1 Introduction
### Aspect
Stative verbs inherently denote situations lacking both inception and termination points, exhibiting atelic properties with homogeneous temporal distribution. Taking know as a paradigmatic example, this verb encodes a continuous state maintained by the subject without temporal interruption. Due to their inherent durative and static nature, stative verbs exhibit low compatibility with progressive aspect marking, as evidenced by the ungrammaticality of constructions like \"He is knowing the name\". This linguistic constraint extends to Mandarin Chinese, where zhi1 dao4 (know) similarly resists combination with progressive markers zhe or zhengzai. The underlying rationale stems from the homogeneous internal structure of states: regardless of temporal observation points, the state remains constant and indivisible into internal phases. This directly conflicts with the progressive aspect's core function of highlighting internal temporal segmentation within events. Activity verbs denote situations lacking explicit inception or termination points, yet unlike stative verbs, they exhibit heterogeneous temporal distribution. This indicates that the activity process comprises dynamic phases while maintaining conceptual unity as a single event. Consequently, activity verbs demonstrate flexible compatibility with progressive aspect marking, as evidenced by English constructions like \"be running\" and Mandarin Chinese sequences with zhengzai preceding pao3 bu4 (run). Transition verbs, by contrast, inherently encode either inception or termination points in their temporal structure. While some transition verbs like build represent durative processes, others, such as die, denote punctual events. The common characteristic across transition verbs is their representation of state changes, either emphasizing the transition process or the resultant state. This dual nature is particularly evident in Chinese verb-verb compounds like ti2 gao1 (improve), which explicitly marks the progression from one state to another. More frequently, however, transition verbs focus on the resultant state, as exemplified by both the English die and the Chinese si3 (die). The inherent state transition in these verbs results in strong compatibility with perfective (or realizative) aspect marking. Representative examples are systematically presented in Table 1.  
Unlike situation types, which are denoted by content verbs or predicates, viewpoint aspects are grammaticalized markers. As is shown by its name, a viewpoint aspectual marker stands for a subject's view or perspective of a situation. Imperfective viewpoints only focus on a phase of a situation, such as be + v-ing, which takes a snapshot of the duration of a situation, while perfective aspectual markers treat a situation as a whole, such as have + v-ed, which regards a situation as a complete and finished one. Grammaticalized aspect markers are generally considered an important demarcation point between aspect languages and non-aspect languages [7]. As a representative of inflectional languages, English has developed multiple viewpoint aspectual markers (such as the progressive aspect and the perfective aspect) or inflectional means, which is also quite common among inflectional languages. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Type**} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{**Features**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Examples**} \\ \cline{2-2} \cline{4-5}  & **Telic** & **Durative** & **Dynamic** & \\ \hline State & – & + & – & know, love \\ Activity & – & \(\pm\) & + & run, hiccup \\ Transition & + & \(\pm\) & + & finish, die \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Lexical aspects. However, Chinese, as a typical isolating language almost without inflectional morphemes, is surprisingly an aspect language with abundant aspectual markers including ZHE, ZAI, ZHENGZAI, LE1, LE2 and GUO.Verbs' abilities to co-occur with these markers serve as an important part in describing their syntactic and semantic features in Chinese [3; 6; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13].