TIME, a crucial concept in human cognition, is differently encoded from one language to another. Yet, how time in language is processed in the brain remains unclear, as such an investigation was mainly conducted based on tense marking in Indo-European languages. The aim of this talk is to investigate how past TIME is expressed in Mandarin with the grammatical aspect markers LE and GUO, and the ‘you (to have) + VP’ construction in Taiwan Mandarin, as well as how the expression of past time with these markers is processed in the brain.

The first part of the talk is dedicated to the linguistic analyses of these markers.Morphosyntactic analyses are provided in order to distinguish between several instances of LE (le₁, le₂ and le₃), GUO (guo₁ and guo₂) and ‘you + VP’. Then, semantic and morphosyntactic analyses are further proposed providing pieces of evidence against the tense analysis of LE, GUO and ‘you + VP’. These analyses support the claim that LE, GUO and ‘you + VP’ are used to express past time based on their respective semantic characteristics (aspectual for le₁, guo₁ and guo_2, modal for ‘you + VP’). These semantic characteristics are linked with different grammatical processes: ‘temporal sequencing’ for le₁, ‘temporal localization + temporal existence’ for guo₁, ‘temporal localization’ for guo₂, ‘temporal existence’ for ‘you + VP’.

In the second part of the talk, the linguistic analyses are tested with two sets of event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The processing of the temporal concord of le₁, guo₁, guo₂ and ‘you + VP’ are investigated in the first set (three ERP experiments). The results indicate that different neuronal processes are at stake for each of the markers (early frontal negativity for le₁, biphasic N400+P600 for guo₁, P600 for guo₂, N400 for ‘you + VP’). These ERP signatures map with the semantic and cognitive functions associated with these markers. In the second set of (two) ERP experiments, the temporal concord processing and aspectual concord processing of LE and GUO are teased apart, suggesting that the results obtained in the first set of experiments do not reflect general processing fashions (e.g., morphosyntactic or semantic repair) but processing mechanisms which are specific to the expression of past time with le₁, guo₁, guo₂ and ‘you + VP’.

Taken together, the linguistic analyses of le₁, guo₁, guo₂ and ‘you + VP’ as well as their neurocognitive processes form a general model of the expression of past time reference in Mandarin. This model sheds light on how time reference is computed in so-called ‘tenseless’ languages and opens numerous windows for further research in the typological and applied linguistic domains.