The perfective aspect particles ‘le’ with the marked semantic feature of ‘result’, presents a situation as a complete one, as the concept of result must include the endpoint of the situation as well as the initial point. Therefore the Chinese perfective ‘le’ is in line with the perfective aspect of the universal grammar which views a situation as a single whole. However, the particle ‘le’, because of its basic invariant meaning of ‘completion’, has the distinctive feature of emphasizing the notion of completion. On this point, it differs from the perfective aspect of the universal grammar.
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
