This paper has sought to use a cross-linguistic approach to analyse and contrast the perfective aspects in Chinese and the past tense in Korean from perspectives of grammaticization and typology. Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca (1994)`s view and methodology are adopted and combined with aspect theories about situation aspect and viewpoint aspect so that some new observation can be made. It is argued that “-었-” in Korean is not a perfective marker, but a marker of past tense together with a use of anterior so that “-었-” can be assigned a higher perfage stage than Chinese particle “le” whose perfage stage is analysed as “old anterior”. It is proposed that this phenomena is inherently decided by the correspondence between a typology of morphological form and a typology of grammatical meaning. Korean is an agglutinative language whose morphological type supports it to evolve into a tense-prominent language while it is natural for an isolating language like Chinese to evolve into a aspect-prominent language which has developed resultives, completives and an old anterior like “le”, but not those high perfages like perfectives or pasts.