New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax

This study investigates the use of the perfective aspect marker  –le in Chinese serial verb constructions through an analysis of 386 serial verb constructions selected from the Sinica Corpus. The analysis takes into account the position of  –le , the form of the object co-occurring with  –le , and the semantic relationships between VP1 and VP2. The results indicate that  –le is used predominately with VP1, that the primary semantic relationship between VP1 and VP2 is “consecu