The Chinese Particle Le

Download or read book The Chinese Particle Le written by M.E. van den Berg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the start of Chinese linguistic studies, the description of the Chinese particle LE has remained elusive. The classification has evolved from a listing of sentences and the discussion of contrastive pairs to a more context and discourse-oriented analysis. The development in recent years of inferential models and situation semantics has opened the way for a renewed study of the use of the Chinese particle LE. This book discusses the Chinese data from a 'mental space' perspective and finally reveals the role so-called Chinese 'sentence LE' plays in the construction and maintenance of discourse.