Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar

37

indicating completion and

talking about the past

Mandarin has no grammatical structure that is entirely equivalent to past tense in English.

Instead, it has structures that signal the completion of an event or that indicate that an event

occurred or did not occur at some time in the past, or that a situation existed at some time in

the past. The primary strategies for indicating completion and talking about the past are presented

in this chapter.

37.1 Marking an action as complete: perfective aspect 了 le

Mandarin uses the verb suffix 了 le to mark an action as bounded and complete. When an

action is marked as complete with respect to now (speech time), completion also indicates that

the action happened in the past.

Only action verbs can be marked as complete. If a stative verb, adjectival verb, or modal verb

is followed by 了 le, the meaning is one of change rather than completion.

C10, 11, 12, 11.3, 13.1, 17.1, 38.1

In the main clause of a sentence, perfective 了 le follows the verb or the verb + object phrase,

depending upon the properties of the object.

When the object is an unmodified noun, perfective 了 le follows the object.

他昨天晚上唱歌了。

Tā zuótiān wǎnshang chàng gē le.

He sang last night.

When the object of the verb is a modified noun – that is, a noun preceded by a specifier,

number, and classifier, and/or any other description phrase – perfective 了 le ordinarily follows

the verb.

她昨天晚上唱了几首歌。

她昨天晚上唱了幾首歌。

Tā zuótiān wǎnshang chàng le jǐ shǒu gē.

She sang a few songs last night.

她今天穿了她姐姐的衣服。

Tā jīntiān chuān le tā jiějie de yīfu.

She wore her older sister’s clothes today.

In some contexts, Mandarin speakers may put perfective 了 le after the object whether the

object noun is modified or not. When in doubt about where to put 了 le, consult your Chinese

teacher or a native speaker of Mandarin.

The adverb 已经/已經 yǐjing already often occurs before an action has been marked as complete.