The Enigma of le in Mandarin Chinese: An Event Quantifier Account of le and non-le with Action Predicates

This research analyses the meaning of the aspect-marker le in Mandarin Chinese. Whereas le is usually claimed to be a marker of temporality (indicating, for example, completion or change-of-state), this account proposes that le is a marker of event quantity, showing that an action occurs a delimited number of times and that particular instances (or groupings thereof) are referred to. This contrasts sentences without le, which refer to event types. This research reveals that whereas for English, the temporal properties of actions are important, for Chinese, it is their quantificational properties that are important, constituting a fundamental difference in how events are conceptualised in the two languages.