Perfect le: Temporal Specification in Mandarin Chinese

The so-called perfective aspect suffix le in Mandarin is reanalyzed as a marker of both perfective aspect & relative anteriority, similar to the English perfect. This analysis further identifies the surface perfect marker le as well as its negative counterpart mei-you as both being surface reflexes of the underlying universal atomic predicate come about (accounting for perfective aspect) acting in conjunction with a commanding instance of the universal existential predicate, rendered in the analysis as you. It is found that le will occur in the surface VP when a higher context-providing predicate occurs, explicitly or implicitly. Modified HA