The Chinese Particle Le Is A Status Marker

The Chinese particle le is often regarded as an aspect marker, but there is greatdispute as to the naming and affiliation under this broad categorization. In fact, thecategory of aspect itself is a rather ambiguous concept, having only vague boundaries withits neighboring concepts. Starting from a comparison of the concept of eventuality andentity, we obtain five possible semantic categories. We argue that tense and aspect are bothproperties of eventualities, rather than verbs. Different from familiar theories, this thesisdistinguishes those categories like eventuality type, deictic tense, non-deictic tense,eventuality phase, eventuality counting and measuring, detaching them from the ratherbroad concept of aspect. The so-called “lexical aspect”,“perfect”,“phasal aspect”,“repetitive aspect”,“attenuative aspect”, all get their distinct positions in this new system.Based on these distinctions, we deny the viewpoints that le is an aspect marker or tensemarker, and propose a new category of status, which is represented by zhe, le, and guo inMandarin Chinese. Finally, we touch upon the connection between status and tense. Tenseis in essence the expression of temporal locations of eventualities. All languages have tolocate eventualities in time. Without grammatical category of tense, the temporal locationsof eventualities are expressed by lexical devices with the help of the status markers andpragmatic reasoning.