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 guo- and 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: 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.