The use of le 了 in Mandarin Chinese oral discourse

le is the mostly widely studied aspect marker in Chinese. In addition to perfective aspect marker to indicate action completion, le can also serve as a sentence-final particle to indicate a currently relevant state. This study investigates how Chinese native speakers use le in oral discourse and the factors that influence their use. The data were collected from three discourses including informal conversations, elicited narratives, and teacher classroom speech. Multivariate analysis of 2,359 tokens revealed that verb complement type and verb type have the strongest effects, followed by le position, serial verb relationship, sentence type, discourse context, and time word presence/absence.