With the renewed interest in functional categories in recent years, much research in the Principles and Parameters framework
has been centred on a popular hypothesis that functional categories head their own independent projections. The author intends to demonstrate from the perspective of Modern Standard Chinese in a series of publications that the establishment of functional categories of Topic, Tense, Aspect and Predication is desirable both theoretically and empirically. The significance of establishing these functional categories in Modern Standard Chinese lies in the fact that it makes possible a unified account of a number of controversial issues in Modern Standard Chinese, for instance, the Chinese word order facts (Li 1999). Following her attempt to establish Topic as an independent
functional category that heads its own projection TopP (李梅和赵婵2002), the author proposes in this paper for the establishment of the functional category Tense based upon her unique observations. Tense, which used to be part of the Inflectional Projection, has been generally recognized as heading its own projection TP under the split INFL hypothesis. Although TP has been widely assumed to exist cross-linguistically, there is a long-standing controversy over the existence of tense in Modern Standard Chinese. The cause of the controversy derives from the fact that, unlike in Indo-European languages where tense is marked morphologically, hardly any elements can be clearly identified as tense markers in Modern Standard Chinese. However, although clauses in Modern Standard Chinese are not always overtly marked with tense, there are cases where overt tense markers are clearly present. This paper is organized as follows. Chiu抯 assumption of the existence of tense by establishing le as a past
tense marker in Modern Standard Chinese is analyzed first in Section 2. It is demonstrated that although her assumption seems appealing at the outset, it fails to explain the appropriateness of clauses where le co-occurs with temporal adverbs with future connotations. The author then proposes to take jiang as a tense marker to mark future tense in Section 3. She argues that although jiang is covertly expressed in conversational Modern Standard Chinese, it does exist in the formal register of this language. Empirical evidence and forceful arguments are produced to support this proposal. Lastly, the structure of TP is examined in Section 4. It is shown that the establishment of the functional category Tense is fully justified in Modern Standard Chinese both from empirical and from theoretical considerations. The present research is imbedded in the Principles and Parameters framework as developed in Noam Chomsky over the years. The discussion is undertaken in the relatively well developed Government and Binding (GB) Theory. Throughout our discussion we presuppose the basic tenets of GB theory such as X-bar theory and its extensions to functional categories (Chomsky 1986, Pollock 1989, Haegeman 1994, Radford 1997) and Relativised Minimality (Rizzi 1990).