Abstract:This study is meant to provide a generative syntactic account of the Chinese aspect marker qilai.As a starting point, a cartographic investigation of the aspectual system is carried out based on previous studies.It is proposed that the notion of aspect can be classified into four levels, i.eJP10.JP, situational aspect, phasal aspect, viewpoint aspect and perspectival aspect, each realized at its specific levels of syntactic derivation and fulfilling different grammatical functions.Based on this view of the aspectual domain, the authors present their view regarding the syntactic status of qilaiand the derivational processes of constructions containing it.It is argued that qilaiis not a simple aspect marker.Rather, it is composed of two aspectual markers, with qiand laifunctioning as phasal and viewpoint aspect heads respectively.Cases where an object nominal occurs between qiand laiare derived in the same way as those where qiand laiare adjacent to each other, both involving head-lowering and clticizing.It is also demonstrated that the co-occurrence constraints between qilaiand other aspect markers can also be accounted for with the proposed analysis.