Synopsis

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.

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