Verbal le in Standard Mandarin is commonly recognized as a perfective marker, typically used to denote bounded events. However, some sentences containing verbal le are more likely to be interpreted as expressing unbounded, durative events. While many scholars argue that such sentences still assert bounded events, with the durative reading resulting from the specific lexical meaning of the verb, this paper proposes that these sentences with verbal le can indeed assert unbounded events. In such interpretations, verbal le marks a stative-imperfective aspect, and the verb indicates a certain state. These factors often interact with the stative constructional meaning of existential sentences with a locative subject, collectively leading to the assertion of event duration. We hypothesize that the functional evolution of verbal le from perfective aspect to stative-imperfective aspect mainly takes place in the construction “verb denoting attachment or maintenance + verbal le + object”. At present, the use of verbal le to indicate the imperfective remains in its early developmental stage, which limits its distribution. In addition, the paper presents two findings. First, the resultative states implied by predicates bearing verbal le fall into four categories, and predicates marked by the imperfective le refer solely to the persistence of the object’s state. Secondly, verbs compatible with the imperfective le generally denote attachment or persistence, and feature both dynamic and static properties. When collocating with the imperfective le, these verbs perform a predominantly static function.
Key words
verbal le /
perfective /
stative imperfective /
verbs denoting attachment or maintenance /
existential sentences
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