Formal semantic analysis reveals how completive -le forces telicity in Mandarin, highlighting the crosslinguistic link between object referentiality and event completion.
Key Points
To provide a formal semantic account of Mandarin postverbal completive -le and determine how it enforces strict telicity and specific referential constraints.
Applied degree-based semantic frameworks to examine postverbal completive -le as distinct from perfective -le.
Modeled the compositional interaction between -le, a covert partitive operator, theme extent, and an abstract path scale.
Completive -le forces strict telicity by requiring the maximal affectedness of the theme argument.
Interaction between -le and a covert partitive operator removes incompletive potential and explains the marker's distinct referentiality constraints.