Ever since the start of Chinese linguistic studies, the description of the Chinese particle LE has remained elusive. The classification has evolved from a listing of sentences and the discussion of contrastive pairs to a more context and discourse--oriented analysis. The development in recent years of inferential models and situation semantics has opened the way for a renewed study of the use of the Chinese particle LE. The present book discusses the Chinese data from a 'mental space' perspective and brings out the role so -called Chinese 'sentence LE' plays in the construction and maintenance of discourse.