Abstract
As verb-le is commonly considered to be an aspectual particle, it may come as a surprise that we devote an entire chapter to it in this book — one would rather expect it to be treated in a book on the functional superstructure of Mandarin. After all, verb-le is quite standardly assumed to head a functional projection like AspP; recently this idea was incorporated in Chiu (1995), but ultimately it goes back to W.Wang (1965). Yet, I think there are very good reasons for claiming that verb-le is not the head of some functional projection, but, instead, occupies a position deeply embedded in the Mandarin VP. In section 2 of this chapter I will make clear what these reasons are. Before that, I will go into the old question as to whether there are two different les or whether ‘verb-le’ (le immediately following the verb, cf. (1a)) and ‘sentence-le’ (le in sentence-final position, as in (1b)) are really both instances of one ‘super-le’.
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Notes
For the two les approach, this distributional difference is not difficult to handle. That sentence-le can be part of a negative sentence with bu ‘not’ is not problematic. The ungrammaticality of (13b) must, I think, be analysed in a vein similar to Huang’s (1988) analysis of (i) (which I cannot go into here; see Ernst (1995)): (i) * wo bu pao-de-kuai I not run-DE-fast
I will only be able to discuss a very limited selection of studies from the huge body of literature on the subject of le.
Listing some contexts where le may not occur, Fang (1980:11 ff.) exemplifies a number of state verbs, along with modals and habitual sentences with jingchang ‘often’ and tiantian ‘every day’.
It is important to note that part of the discussion on le has taken place against the background of another ongoing discussion which, influenced by Western grammatical tradition, focuses on the question of tense and aspect, and whether le instantiates the one or the other. The conclusion drawn is generally that le instantiates aspect. As an aspectual particle, le is consequently classified as perfective, rather than imperfective or any other aspectual category that has been distinguished. A fine and early example of this discussion is to be found in Zhang (1957); a more recent example is Gong (1991). These circumstances have led to a situation in which terms as “perfect”, “perfective” and “completion” or wánchéng, wánchéngshì and wánchéngshí are not always distinguished or, for that matter, defined in any precise manner. Li & Thompson’s (1981) careful treatment of le is interesting because, while claiming that le expresses perfectivity, they carefully avoid the term “completed”; instead they use the term “bounded” — a subtle, but important modification. They hold that verb-le “expresses perfectivity, that is, it indicates that an event is being viewed in its entirety or as a whole. An event is viewed in its entirety if it is bounded temporally, spatially or conceptually” (p. 185) (which is reminiscent of Comrie’s 1976:16 definition of perfectivity). To illustrate, consider the temporally bounded example in (48) in the text. This sentence conveys that the event of ‘reading a book’ is bounded, it is complete — a complete whole; and only in this sense does le express completion.
Structurally, as suggested in footnote 17 of chapter 2, they are, of course, the predicate of result denoting small clauses.
In these sentences, le is interchangeable with so-called “durative” marker zhe; we turn to this briefly in section 3 below.
This is of course also a kind of realization; I will make that clear later. To avoid confusion, I will temporarily use Freezing le for the le described here.
Fang (1980:8f.) contends that le is not unique at all, it just happens to be more grammaticalized than others, like qilai ‘up-come: begin’ and chulai ‘out-come: result/success’, the term grammaticalized being defined as: reduced in semantics as well as in phonology.
The same development is involved in the placement of directional result predicates, as is pointed out in Zhou (1957:27).
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Sybesma, R. (1999). Verb-Le . In: The Mandarin VP. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9163-8_3
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