LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 1.2:109-133, 2000 On the Temporal Meaning of the Verbal -le in Chinese* Jo-wang Lin National Chiao Tung University This paper gives a unifying temporal analysis of the distribution of the verbal -le in Mandarin Chinese within a framework of model-theoretic truth-conditional semantics. I argue that syntactically, -le must raise from Asp to Tense at LF and semantically, it requires that the initial subinterval of the target state of its containing proposition precede a pragmatically determined reference time. Thus, -le not only contributes an aspectual meaning to the sentence but also is a relative past tense marker. The result of this study implies that it might be wrong to claim that Chinese is a completely tenseless language as the common assumption holds. Key words: Chinese, -le, model-theoretic, truth-conditional, temporal 1. Introduction The Chinese verbal suffix -le, whose use is illustrated in (1), has received much attention in the Chinese literature (Li and Thompson 1981, Liu 1988, Heinz 1990, Jing 1993, Huang 1988, among many others). 1 (1) Wo mai-le yi-ben shu I buy-Asp one-Cl book ‘I bought a book.’ Traditionally, most authors have treated -le as an aspect marker, focusing on what kind of aspect it expresses. Some other authors such as Magione and Li (1993), Dai (1994) and Xing (1996), on the other hand, have paid a great attention to the temporal meaning of -le. However, as far as I know, few people have tried to explain how and why the temporal meaning of -le may fit with past, on-going and future situations, as illustrated by (2), (3) and (4b-d), while at the same time excluding examples like (4a). * For helpful comments and discussions, I would like to thank Professor Xinyi Xie and Professor James Huang and the audience at IsCLL VI (1998), where an earlier version of this paper was presented. I also thank two referees of the journal of Language and Linguistics for correcting some mistakes for me. Of course, I alone am responsible for any remaining error. 1 Chinese has another le, which occurs in sentence-final position. In this paper, I will focus on only the verbal suffix -le.