A Description of LE in Mandarin Chinese and its pedagogical implications

Aspect of Mandarin Chinese has attracted much interest and attention in recent years. Mandarin language is regarded as exclusively an aspect language (Gong 1991) for that the language does not grammatically mark tense but grammatically marks aspect. However, in contrast, English grammatically marks both tense and aspect (Xiao and McEnery 2002). In Mandarin Chinese there are four major aspect markers: guo, zai, zhe, and LE, in which guo is experiential aspect marker, zai and zhe are progressive aspect markers, whereas LE has been the most controversial marker in Mandarin.