English Translation Of Chinese Sentence Final Particle Le

The research on particle'le'proves to be indispensable to the study of tense and aspect in Chinese. In terms of its syntactic positions,'le'can usually be distinguished as post-verbal and sentence-final. This thesis explores the grammatical and pragmatic meanings and functions of sentence-final particle le and the English translation of it. The functions of sentence final particle le are instantiated with statistics from the two different English versions of the Luo Tuo Xiang Zi by Lao She. It is proposed in the thesis that at semantico-syntactic level, sentence final particle le, basically, indicates a'change of state'that has occurred, is occurring or will occur. Boundary is a key feature of sentence final particle le. In circumstances where a'change of state'interpretation is inadequate to give a satisfactory account, the temporal features of the predicate within the scope of sentence final particle le have to be taken into account. If the predicate is [+bounded], a terminative reading is possible; whereas a [-bounded] predicate within the scope of sentence final le may give an inchoative reading. At the discourse level, sentence final particle le signals the end of a discourse block.Contrastive studies and statistical analysis of the two English versions of the Luo Tuo Xiang Zi reveal that (1) sentences ended with sentence final particle le have been translated with different tenses in the target English language, which affirms that sentence final particle le is not a tense marker and the choices of tenses in the translation are made according to the temporal adverbials or expressions and, in the absence of them other contextual factors; (2) temporal features of the predicate within the scope of sentence final particle le may influence the translator's reproduction of the sentence. The inchoative reading of the predicate may stimulate the translator for an overt translation with verbs such as start or begin. The terminative reading of the predicate may account for some of the circumstances where sentence final particle le is translated with the perfective aspect; (3)'change of state'interpretation of sentence final particle le may account for some translators'preference to use'now', if possible, to highlight the'change of state'on the...