In addition to appearing as a verbal suffix, le may also occur in the sentence-final position as illustrated in (29b). The distinction between the verbal le and the sentence-final le has been traditionally characterized as follows: The former describes perfectivity of a situation (Wang (1965); Chao (1968); Li and Thompson (1981);
Magione and Li (1993)), whereas the latter signals inchoativity or change of state
(Teng (1975); Chan (1980); Zhu (1982)), current relevance or perfect (Li, Thompson and Thompson (1982); Mochizuki (2000)). Although several pieces of evidence have been adduced to support the twole distinction, it is not agreed by everyone that le as a verbal suffix and le as a sentence-final particle are two different les. For example, Shi (1990) has analyzed the two les as having the same meaning. In this paper, I will not go into the debate, so I will not review the relevant arguments. Instead, I will only explicate my own view of the sentence-final le. If the analysis to be proposed is correct, it implies that though the meanings of the two les are not completely alike, their core meaning is actually the same.
As a first step toward understanding the meaning of the sentence-final le, let us compare (29a), which has the verbal le with (29b), which has the sentence-final le.
(29) a. Zhangsan mai-le yi-bu xin che Zhangsan buy-Asp one-Cl new car
‘Zhangsan bought a new car.’
b. Zhangsan mai yi-bu xin che le Zhangsan buy one-Cl new car Le
‘Zhangsan has bought a new car.’
Looking at the above two sentences alone, it is very difficult to tell what exactly differentiates them in a very precise way. Both examples require that before the speech time the event of buying a car be completed. So at first sight the truth conditions for the two sentences in question seem to be the same. However, if the two sentences are put into a discourse, their different truth conditions will begin to emerge.
Compare (30a) with (30b).
(30) a. Zhangsan zuotian mai-le yi liang xin che, keshi jintian jiu ba chezi Zhangsan yesterday buy-Asp one Cl new car but today then BA car
mai-gei-le bieren
sell-to-Asp other-people
‘Zhangsan bought a new car yesterday, but he sold it to some other person today.’
b. ?? Zhangsan zuotian mai yi-liang xin che le, keshi jintian jiu ba Zhangsan yesterday buy one-Cl new car Le but today then Ba
chezi mai-gei-le bieren car sell-to-Asp other-people
‘Zhangsan bought a new car yesterday, but he sold it to some other person today.’
The above contrast indicates that the sentence-final le implies that the car that Zhangsan bought is still in his possession at the speech time, which makes the discourse in (30b) incoherent, but there is no such implication for the verbal le. In other words, the sentence-final le seems to require that the result state brought about by the buying event must still hold at the speech time.
Another example that points to the same direction is the contrast between (31a) and (31b).
(31) a. Wo zai meiguo zhu-le ershi nian, cong mei tingshuo-guo zhe-zhong shi I in America live-Asp twenty year ever not hear-Asp this-kind thing ‘I (have) lived in America for 20 years and (have) never heard this kind of thing.’
b. Wo zai meiguo zhu ershi nian le, cong-mei tingshuo-guo zhe-zhong shi
I in America live twenty year Le ever not hear-Asp this kind thing ‘I have lived in America for 20 years and have never heard this kind of thing.’
Intuitively, (31a) is compatible with a situation in which I still do or a situation in which I no longer live in America at the speech time, but (31b) is only compatible with a situation in which I still live in America at the moment of speech. In other words, (31b) implies that the state of my living in America still holds at the speech time.
For completeness sake, it is also interesting to compare (32) with (33). (32) is a progressive sentence, which is often claimed to describe a state. (33) consists of an activity predicate, which may describe an episode or a habitual property.
(32) Wo zai he kafei le I Prog drink coffee Le
‘I am (in the state of) drinking coffee now.’
(33) Wo he kafei le I drink coffee Le (i) ‘I have had coffee.’
(ii) ‘I now drink coffee, (though I didn’t before).’
Although activities and progressive states are both atelic, they seem to give rise to different implications when they occur with the sentence-final le. When a sentence describes a (progressive) state, use of the sentence-final le requires that the (progressive) state still hold at the speech time. It is often claimed that such sentences have an inchoative interpretation. In contrast, when a sentence describes an activity, the activity can be terminated but its result state should hold at the speech time and is
relevant to the current situation. This interpretation somewhat resembles English present perfect according to which the main focus is current result state rather than the past event. The habitual or generic interpretation of activity predicates patterns with the behavior of (progressive) states in that the habitual generic state must hold at the speech time. This is not surprising, because just like progressive sentences, habitual or generic sentences are often claimed to be states, too.
The above discussion of the sentence-final le clearly suggests that its meaning involves some notion of result state. Although I will not be very explicit about the definition of result state, it seems quite reasonable to say that an event has an associated result state only when the event is over. In fact, the result state must immediately follow the event that brings it about. If this is correct, then the presence of the sentence-final le entails realization of the event that brings about the result state.
What is more problematic is states. Do states have result states? The answer to this question seems to be not apparent at all and might differ from a person to another person. Despite this, I would like to assume that states have associated result states;
namely, the result state of a state is the state itself. Given this assumption, a function RESULT can now be defined so that when it applies to an eventuality, it yields the result state of that eventuality. If the above discussions are all correct, the meaning of the sentence-final le can be defined in a way almost identical to the meaning of the verbal le except that an additional condition should be added to the effect that the result state overlaps the speech time. In other words, the meaning of the sentence-final le can be defined as in (34), where “RESULT(e)Οs*” reads as “the result state of e overlaps the speech time”.
(34) [[le]] = : λPλt2λe∃e’[ P(e) ∧ P(e’) ∧ e’≤E e ∧ τ(e’)⊆t2∧ t2≤τ(epro) ∧ RESULT(e)Οs*]
The requirement that the result state overlaps the speech time explains why sentences with the sentence-final le have implication of current relevance as many linguists have observed.
A very good feature about the above approach to the sentence-final le is that it explains why the verbal le and the sentence-final le are so similar. Their meanings are very similar because they share the same core meaning, the only difference being that the sentence-final le has a condition on the result state that does not appear in the meaning of the verbal le. If this analysis is correct, this should contribute to the debate between the single-le analysis or the two-le analysis in the literature.