Jackie Yan-Ki Lai

Partitivity and referentiality constraint: Removing incompletive potential with Mandarin -le

We present a formal analysis of an understudied postverbal completive marker -le in Mandarin, distinct from the perfective -le. We propose that completive -le forces strict telicity via maximal affectedness of the theme. Building on degree-based approaches, we show that -le interacts with a covert partitive operator to...