Publications

Publication details [#6205]

Li, Charles N., Sandra A. Thompson and R. McMillan Thompson. 1982. The discourse motivation for the perfect aspect: The Mandarin particle 'le'. In Hopper, Paul J., ed. Tense-Aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Containing the contributions to a symposium on tense and aspect, held at UCLA, May 1979. John Benjamins. pp. 19–44.

Publication type

Article in book

Publication language

English

Keywords

attitude | particle | perfective

Language as a subject

Chinese, Mandarin

Annotation

An attempt to show that the member 'le' of the set of 'attitudinal' sentence-final particles in Mandarin performs many of the functions of perfect aspect, this in the light of a theory on the distinction between basic aspect categories on pragmatic grounds.