A minimalist approach to the re-grammaticalization of morphology: Chinese verbal ‑le as aspect and tense

This paper examines variation in the interpretation of the Chinese verbal suffix ‑le and attributes it to a process of ongoing change in which an original aspectual system is gradually developing into a new tense system. The paper argues that the incremental pattern of re-grammaticalization can best be captured in a minimalist feature-based approach to the licensing of morphology, which factors clines of development into formally discrete, individual steps.