Project

Tense and Aspect in Early Chinese Buddhist Literature: A Diachronic and Comparative Study

Acronym
01S1515
Code
01SC1515
Duration
16 February 2015 → 30 November 2019
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Fellow
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Chinese language
    • Diachronic linguistics
    • Theoretical linguistics
Keywords
early Chinese Buddhist literature tense aspect Oriental languages Middle Ages Language and text analysis Chinese Asia Far East Linguistics
 
Project description

This research deals with the contextualized usages of tense and aspect expressions in early Chinese Buddhist literature produced before the fifth century, the primary sources of early Chinese. The linguistic features of their tense and aspect markers will be compared with those in pre-Buddhist texts and contemporary non-Buddhist texts thus revealing how those markers developed in early Chinese.