This talk presents an analysis of the Mandarin temporal particle le that attempts to extract the core semantics underlying its different uses. Two occurrences of le are of primary interest — one resembles a verbal suffix (1, call it the verbal-le), the other a clause-final particle (2, call it the clausal-le). Interestingly, the two instances are not complementary (3).
We propose that both verbal-le and clausal-le contribute past-tense semantics that is of an existential nature, and their differences can be largely attributed to their scope distinction. This characterisation explains several distributional patterns of both instances, including their associations with modified-numeral objects and interactions with positional temporal adverbials. The characterisation is worked out in a fully compositional fragment, and its implications on the temporal interpretation system in Mandarin will be discussed.