On the Independence of Mandarin Aspectual and Contrastive Sentence-Final ne

This paper argues for treating the Mandarin sentence-final particle ne as ambiguous between marking contrastive topic, in the sense of Büring 2003, and marking durative aspect. This account is novel is two ways. First, it rejects the widespread view that ne never marks aspect, representing a revival of Chan’s (1980) classic aspectual analysis. Second, while topic-marking ne is known to mark contrastive topic (Lee 2003), I believe my account is the first to extend contrastive topic meaning to the sentence-final particle. The fact that aspectual ne and contrastive ne cannot co-occur is treated as the result of a haplology constraint, parallel to the more familiar haplology effects targeting the particle le.