A Comparative Study of Features of Tense and Aspect in Persian and Chinese Based on Corpus-Linguistics

The concepts of tense and aspect have a special place in grammar. Tense can be used to express an action or event in the past, present, or future, while aspect can indicate the beginning, progress, or completion of an action or event. Since these two concepts and their representation in Persian and Chinese have their own specific features, and very few comparative studies have been conducted in this domain, this research aims to find the features of these two concepts and discover their similarities and differences using corpus linguistics, statistics, and quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. The results of this study can be used in language teaching, grammar, and translation. In this research, 9189 propositions including 4172 Persian propositions with their corresponding translations into Chinese and 5017 Chinese propositions with their corresponding translations into Persian extracted from two novels "Blind Owl" in Persian and "Running through Beijing's Streets" in Chinese with their translations into Chinese and Persian were examined. Bilingual corpora of Persian-Chinese and Chinese-Persian were constructed. By observing the changes that occurred during the translation process in the structure of each proposition, the features related to them, similarities and fundamental differences and the type of representation of tense and aspect in these two languages were obtained. In Persian, verb plays a key role in sentence containing grammatical information such as tense and aspect. However, in Chinese noun plays a key role in sentence and the verb can be omitted. Therefore, it is not possible to pustulate a clear-cut classification for tense in Chinese.