Perfective Aspect and Transition inMandarin Chinese: An Analysis of Double -le Sentences

Abstract

We refer to the –le that occurs immediately after the verb as verbal –le, and the one at the end of the sentence as sentential –le. Sentences with both verbal –le and sentential –le are referred to as double – le sentences. Because verbal –le and sentential –le have the same form and sometimes appear to contribute the same meaning to the sentence, there have been attempts to treat verbal –le and sentential –le as instances of the same morpheme (e.g., Shi 1990, Huang and Davis 1989). In our previous work, we proposed that verbal –le and sentential –le are distinct morphemes. We claim that verbal –le is a perfective aspect marker (Soh and Gao, to appear), while sentential –le is a transition marker that triggers a presupposition about an immediate past situation that is in opposition to the one described by the sentence (Soh and Gao 2004). Our analysis accounts for when sentences with verbal –le and sentential –le appear to share the same interpretation and when they do not. In this paper, we extend our analysis to double –le sentences. We show that the readings associated with double –le sentences follow from the combination of the individual semantic contributions of verbal –le and sentential –le, once we assume that sentential –le has scope over verbal –le. We claim that sentential –le takes scope below the yes-no question particle ma and the auxiliary shi ‘be’ and above auxiliaries like hui ‘will’ and neng ‘can’, while verbal –le takes scope below shi ‘be’, but above the pre-verbal negation. We propose an analysis of a well-known restriction on the co-occurrence of verbal –le and negation, which supports the claim that negative sentences denote states (De Swart and Molendijk 1999).