I. Aspect versus tense
Mandarin
learners who are native speakers of an inflectional language, such as English,
tend to mistake le 了for a past tense marker
because it is often used in remarks related to past actions or situations.
Meanwhile, le also puzzles them when sometimes it is absent from sentences
where they expect it to be used. The following four examples all have a time
word or expression indicating a past time, yet only two of
them use le 了.
Le 了 is used.
1. Zuótiān wǒ mǎi-le sān běn shū.
昨天我买了三本书。
I bought three books
yesterday.
2. Shàng ge zhōumò wǒ qu
上个周末我去北京了。
I
went to
Le了is not used.
3. Zuótiān wǒ shì wǔ diǎnzhōng huílai de.
昨天我是五点钟回来的。
Yesterday it was at
4. Yǐqián wǒ bú cháng yùndòng, suǒyǐ hěn pàng.
以前我不常运动，所以很胖。
Before,
I did not often exercise. So I was fat.
The
last two examples above show that, even if the time words indicate the past, le is not used in either sentence. If le is not
a past tense marker, what is it and how is it used? The discussion should begin
with an understanding of the concepts of tense and aspect.
“The
category of aspect is very different from that of tense: a marker of tense relates the time of the occurrence
of the situation to the time that situation is brought up in speech. In
English, for example, we have past tense, as in, ‘I proposed a toast’, where
the suffix -ed signals that the act of proposing took place before the time of
speaking. Mandarin has no markers of tense. The language does not use verb
affixes to signal the relation between the time of the occurrence of the
situation and the time that situation is brought up in speech. Aspect, on the
other hand, refers, not to the time relation between a situation and the moment
of its being mentioned in speech, but, rather, to how the situation itself is
being viewed with respect to its own internal makeup.” (Charles
N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson: 1981, p. 184).
Charles
Li and Sandra Thompson point out that aspect expresses different ways of
viewing a situation. While inflectional languages like English are concerned
with marking the time of the action in relation to the time of the remark in
which it is brought up, Chinese is more concerned with the developmental stage
of an action. A time expression alone or even the context itself is sufficient
to show time, such as the past, the present or the future. Therefore,
inflection is not at all necessary and is non-existent in Chinese. In a given
time frame, in Chinese an action is viewed with
an emphasis on a particular phase along the course of its progress, which can
be its beginning, its continuation, or its completion. “Each of these stages is
referred to as an ‘aspect.’ A past action has all these aspects, so does a
present action and a future action. Therefore, in English, the ‘perfective,’ or
the ‘completive,’ may appear in the present tense, the past tense or the future
tense.” (Hung-nin S. Cheung: 1994,
p. 207).
Past perfect: I
had already arrived (when he called).
Present perfect: I have
already arrived.
Future
perfect: I
shall have arrived (by eight tomorrow morning).
(Hung-nin S. Cheung: 1994, p. 207).
Knowing
the difference between aspect and tense makes it easier to understand that le 了marks the perfective aspect
of an action, not past tense. There are two kinds of le 了that relate to completed actions. One is the perfective aspect particle le了, the other is the modal particle le了. Read on to learn their
differences.