Abstract

Mandarin Chinese is shown not to be a tenseless language, but to have a covert Tense with a [non-future] value. As in Indo-European languages, a tensed clause in Chinese is considered to be finite: Chinese projects a TP hosting the subject in its specifier, while the head Tense remains unrealized. Given the cases where the complementizer le is obligatory for a sentence to be acceptable on its own, the role of le as a possible equivalent of the head Fin° in Rizzi’s (1997) split CP is examined. While an overt C does not necessarily encode finiteness in Chinese, it seems nevertheless safe to assume that the presence of a C entails the finiteness of the sentence at hand. Importantly, the relation between the presence of a C and the finiteness of the proposition involved only works one way, i.e. the unacceptability of an overt low C does not allow to deduce the non-finite character of the sentence at hand. Against this backdrop, recent studies concerning tense and finiteness in Chinese are examined in detail, thus allowing the non-specialist to better see the limits of these proposals.