Tense-Aspect Meaning, Pragmatic Function And Translation Of Modern Chinese Verbal -le

Verbal -le is one of the essential functional words in Chinese. However, there has been no unanimous agreement on its concrete tense and aspect meaning. In addition, its functions and its English translation have received little attention from scholars at home and abroad. In view of those, this thesis intends to explore the tense-aspect meaning, pragmatic functions and English translation of -le.This research, on the basis of English-Chinese and Chinese-English parallel corpora, tries to achieve a combination between theory and data. Compared with intuition-based approach, the corpus-based one, which is facilitated by software and statistical procedures, is more reliable and convenient for the study. In this thesis, Smith's two-component aspect model, situation aspect and viewpoint aspect, is chosen as the basic theoretical framework.Through the study, tentative conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) -le is an actual aspect marker indicating the inception, duration and completion of an action or event. According to different reference time, the actual aspect can be divided into past actuality, present actuality and future actuality; (2) as to the pragmatic functions, -le is a peak marker and an anteriority marker. The peak -le denotes the event that carries -le is the peak one in the related events while the anteriority -le expresses one event prior to another or the first one is the cause of the second; (3) through the contrastive study of functional load of -le in original Chinese texts and translated Chinese texts, the results show that past tense, perfective aspect and other forms are the corresponding forms of -le and its translation has a close relationship with verb classes, pragmatic functions, contextual meaning and so on.The findings of the present research will contribute to the study of tense-aspect in Chinese. The research into the functions of -le could deepen and enrich our understanding for its actual aspect meaning, and provides a sound basis for its translation. Furthermore, study of English translation of -le and Chinese translation of perfective aspect is conductive to the contrastive study and translation of tense and aspect in two languages.