The role of pragmatics in interpreting the chinese perfective markers -guo and -le§

It is claimed in the literature that the perfective marker -guo has the following semantic properties: discontinuity, repeatability/reversibility, and partiality, which contrast with the continuation and totality properties of the perfective marker -le. Previous analyses adopt a purely semantic approach to account for the above properties of -guo and -le, and the role played by pragmatics is not recognized. In this paper, we argue that the purely semantic approach is not adequate, and show that both semantics and pragmatics play a role in the interpretation of -guo and -le, which motivates us to propose a semantic-pragmatic account to explain the properties of guoand le-sentences in Chinese. Following previous analyses like Smith’s (1997), we treat the basic semantics of both -guo and -le as presenting a perfective viewpoint. However, unlike previous studies, we claim that the so-called semantic properties demonstrated by the two markers are all pragmatic implicatures. After revisiting the three properties discussed in previous studies, we suggest replacing discontinuity and repeatability/ reversibility with the new property ‘‘change-out-of-state’’ while keeping the totality/partiality property. We propose to determine the selection of -guo and -le by a pragmatic condition when semantics imposes no restriction on their co-occurrence with the predicate in question: Journal of Pragmatics 36 (2004) 441–466 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2003.07.003 § Part of the results reported in this paper is derived from the Strategic Research Grants #7001252 and #7001397, funded by the City University of Hong Kong, and the RGC Competitive Earmarked Research Grant #9040855, funded by the Hong Kong government; the generous support of the University and the Government is thus acknowledged. Part of the paper was presented at the 12th North America Conference on Chinese Linguistics, San Diego, June 16–18, 2000. The authors would like to thank the participants at the conference for their helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks go to Carlota Smith and Jacob Mey for their comments and suggestions. As usual, the authors are responsible for all the potential errors in the paper. The following abbreviations are used in the paper: DE—possessive marker, SFP—sentence final particle, CL—classifier, RES—resultative particle, LE—aspect marker –le/sentence final –le, and GUO—aspectual marker –guo. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Pan), [email protected] (P. Lee). If the speaker wants to emphasize a change out of state and/or partial realization of the situation, -guo will be preferred, but -le will be a better alternative, if the speaker wants to emphasize continuation of the resultative state and/or total realization of the relevant situation. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.