On the Temporal Meaning of the Verbal -le in Chinese

This paper gives a unifying temporal analysis of the distribution of the verbal -le in Mandarin Chinese within a framework of model-theoretic truth-conditional semantics. I argue that syntactically, -le must raise from Asp to Tense at LF and semantically, it requires that the initial subinterval of the target state of its containing proposition precede a pragmatically determined reference time. Thus, -le not only contributes an aspectual meaning to the sentence but also is a relative past tense marker. The result of this study implies that it might be wrong to claim that Chinese is a completely tenseless language as the common assumption holds.