Academic literature on the topic 'Japanese tense and aspect'

This thesis analyses the nine main tense–aspect constructions in Old Japanese in more detail than ever before, exploiting the research possibilities created by the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. The commitment to close textual reading and the interpretation of examples in context that is characteristic of traditional Japanese scholarship is combined with a determination to explain the distributional data revealed by the Corpus. Large samples are used to produce quantitative semantic analyses, allowing a new perspective on multifunctional constructions from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. All findings are placed within the wider perspective of cross-linguistic studies of tense and aspect, an approach often missing in Old Japanese scholarship. This thesis is the most comprehensive analysis of Old Japanese tense and aspect to date. Some traditional conclusions are challenged, and light is shed on many previously unexplained phenomena. Resultative constructions are discovered to be even more pervasive in Japanese than previously thought, with at least five of the nine con-structions I look at hypothesized to have begun as resultative constructions. In most cases these constructions have broadened to also denote ongoing activities, another characteristic of Japanese. This thesis thereby contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of resultative constructions, and to the question of the validity and nature of the distinction between activities and states. It also shows the potential of an exemplar-based model of linguistic storage, which is seen to be a powerful tool for explaining both the multifunctionality of grammatical constructions and semantic change.

The nature of tense in classical Japanese is vague and uncertain, sometimes appearing to be interpretable by combinations of particular verbs with specific verbal auxiliaries and sometimes appearing to be absent altogether. The present study introduces a series of these so-called tense-bearing auxiliaries in classical Japanese while attempting to show that their use can be ambiguous based on the contexts in which they appear. The notions of context driven semantic formalism are explored as a possible means to derive truth from these utterances that seem otherwise tenseless when taken out of context. To accomplish this, time and tense are given very specific meaning and definition and thereafter explored in the context of both modern and classical Japanese.

The current study has attempted to answer the question whether there is an interaction between the Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis by investigating the use of Japanese tense-aspect morphology by native speakers of English learning Japanese as L2. These two hypotheses were argued for independently in previous studies, but never consolidated to account for the distributional pattern of L2 tense-aspect morphology. The Aspect Hypothesis claims that the L1 and L2 learners initially mark lexical aspect of the verbs with tense-aspect morphology; they tend to associate past with achievement verbs and progressive with activity verbs. On the other hand, according to the Discourse Hypothesis, the learners use the tense-aspect morphology to distinguish grounding; they tend to mark foreground with past more frequently than background. The current research used two methods: a multiple-choice task and a storytelling task. The former task was referred to as Study 1. The use of tense-aspect morphology in the story-telling task was analyzed in terms of lexical aspect, referred to as Study 2 and grounding, referred to as Study 3. Study 1 and Study 2 examined whether the use of tense-aspect morphology is different in obligatory contexts and in narrative discourse. The results of Study 1 supported the Aspect Hypothesis; L2 learners initially associated past inflection with achievement verbs and tended to mark the process encoded in activity and accomplishment verbs with present durative. The results of Study 2 supported the Aspect Hypothesis as regards the association of activity verbs and present durative. However, the frequent marking of past on achievement verbs across the proficiency levels suggest that the textual function of tense-aspect morphology plays a role in narrative discourse. Study 3 argued that the Japanese tense-aspect morphology weakly mark grounding. Finally, I claimed that the Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis account for the different acquisition stages of the L2 tense-aspect system. There is a time lag among the tense-aspect morphemes in the process of acquisition; past marking functions as the temporal and textual device in narrative discourse at the relatively early stage while present durative remains as the marker of lexical aspect.

Early Middle Japanese is one of the oldest attested stages of Japanese. Its rich legacy consists of several literary works from the Heian era (7 th to 11 th centuries), some of which are still appreciated and widely read today. Despite a long tradition of research both within and outside Japan, quite a few details of the language remain incompletely understood. The present study addresses a long-standing question in the verbal domain of Early Middle Japanese, namely the semantics of the two so-called “past tenses” in -ki and -ker-. I tested the major hypotheses regarding their use by means of qualitative, corpus-based methods. Specifically, I trained a machine learning algorithm to predict which is likeliest of -ki and -ker- given a set of grammatical and semantic variables. Analysis of the results indicates that the suffixes likely embody a contrast between witnessed and non-witnessed past tense. It is also possible that mirativity—the grammaticalized expression of surprise at learning something unexpected—and aspect influence the choice of past tense suffix.

The main aim of this thesis is to consider some consequences of the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (1986) for explaining a number of phenomena relating to verbal aspect. Chapter one introduces some basic notions relating to aspect and illustrates the interaction of aspect and tense and gives an outline of the main tenets of relevance theory. Chapter two considers the aspectual categories (simple-progressive) of English and (perfective-imperfective) of Serbo- Croat in relation to each other, and also in relation to the the classification of verbs according to the situation types they denote. Problems of defining the aspectual categories of these two languages are examined, and the suggestion is put forward that relevance theory provides the framework which makes it possible to maintain a fairly austere semantics of aspectual categories as well as to explain aspectual choice. Chapter three examines the treatment of aspectual categories in terms of subjectivity. It is argued that speakers' intuitions about the aspectual categories being expressive of subjectivity can be explained pragmatically, in terms of the notions of loose use and interpretive use. In Chapter four, I argue that in addition to the feature of completion, the semantics of aspectual categories of both English and Serbo-Croat needs to be characterised in terms of reference to particular events instantiating the property denoted by the predicate. I show how this assumption makes it possible to explain a number of uses of the English progressive. I then proceed to argue that the progressive of English and the perfective of Serbo-Croat differ with regard to completion but that they both point indexically, as it were, to a particular event instantiating the property denoted by the predicate. This assumption is shown to be crucial in explaining aspectual choice in the two languages. Although the data discussed are drawn solely from English and Serbo-Croat, the central ideas presented should carry over to Slavonic languages in general. Chapter five looks at situation type aspect in the light of Sperber and Wilson's (1986) view that conceptual information is stored in three types of entries. It is shown that the difference in the behaviour of verbs which intuitively seems to correlate with dynamicness and stativity, is best explained in terms of a three-way distinction determined by meaning postulate-like rules in the logical entries of concepts for individual verbs. I also give evidence in support of the view that accomplishment VPs fall into two classes depending on whether or not they grammaticalise completion, and I show that the grammaticalisation of completion in some predicates of this type is pragmatically explained.

English exhibits a rich apparatus of tense, aspect, time adverbials and other expressions that can be used to order states of affairs with respect to each other, or to locate them at a point in time with respect to the moment of speech. Ideally one would want a semantics for these expressions to demonstrate that an orderly relationship exists between any one expression and the meanings it conveys. Yet most existing linguistic and formal semantic accounts leave something to be desired in this respect, describing natural language temporal categories as being full of ambiguities and indetenninacies, apparently escaping a uniform semantic description. It will be argued that this anomaly stems from the assumption that the semantics of these expressions is directly related to the linear conception of time familiar from temporal logic or physics - an assumption which can be seen to underly most of the current work on tense and aspect. According to these theories, the cognitive work involved in the processing of temporal discourse consists of the ordering of events as points or intervals on a time line or a set of time lines. There are, however, good reasons for wondering whether this time concept really is the one that our linguistic categories are most directly related to; it will be argued that a semantics of temporally referring expressions and a theory of their use in defining the temporal relations of events require a different and more complex structure underlying the meaning representations than is commonly assumed. A semantics will be developed, based on the assumption that categories like tense, aspect, aspectual adverbials and propositions refer to a mental representation of events that is structured on other than purely temporal principles, and to which the notion of a nucleus or consequentially related sequence of preparatory process, goal event and consequent state is central. It will be argued that the identification of the correct ontology is a logical preliminary to the choice of any particular formal representation scheme, as well as being essential in the design of natural language front-ends for temporal databases. It will be shown how the ontology developed here can be implemented in a database that contains time-related information about events and that is to be queried by means of natural language utterances.