Introduction

Ever since the start of Chinese linguistic studies, the description of the Chinese particle LE has remained elusive. The classification has evolved from a listing of sentences and the discussion of contrastive pairs to a more context and discourse-oriented analysis. The development in recent years of inferential models and situation semantics has opened the way for a renewed study of the use of the Chinese particle LE. This book discusses the Chinese data from a ''mental space'' perspective and finally reveals the role so-called Chinese ''sentence LE'' plays in the construction and maintenance of discourse.