Divergence and Convergence in Tense and Aspect Meanings of “guo” and “le”

The paper discusses the divergence and convergence in aspect and tense meanings via semantic feature analysis. Arguably, the divergence of the experiential marker guo过 and the actualize marker le了 are embodied in aspect and tense meanings. In particular, the tense and aspect meanings of guo过 indicates factual connection between the past event and current one. As such, the reality of event is accentuated by backtracking the past experience. The tense and aspect meanings of le了is involved with eventual connection between the past event and current one, which express the actualization of event via highlighting the action perfective. The convergence of the tense of guo过 and le了 can be rendered by a couple of conditions, including (1) the suppression of le了 on guo过 in the syntactic structure of “V-guo-le-O”, which leads to the semantic meaning of the close-temporal past event; (2) the force of temporal adverbials on the distance between the event time and speech time (reference time); (3) the compliment of frequency induce the number of times that the past event happened, which emphasized the same “Perfective” meaning of guo过 and le了.