Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This chapter is concerned with the semantics of tense and aspect in Japanese. The semantics of tense and aspect has been studied within various theoretical persuasions, and this chapter cannot possibly do justice to every previous research endeavor that concerns the semantics of tense and aspect in Japanese. What I hope to accomplish here is very modest in terms of scope. I restrict my attention to a very small number of issues that I consider to be theoretically important. Furthermore I discuss previous studies only if they are conducted in a formal semantic framework or are interpretable in formal semantic terms. But for the sake of readability, this chapter is written in such a way that the main argumentation can be followed by any linguist who is interested in the issues under discussion. Before discussing specific issues and examples, I shall provide a general guideline for how the terms “tense” and “aspect” will be used in this chapter. I adopt Comrie's (1976: 1–3) suggestion given in (1) as our guide. (1)  Tense relates the time of the situation referred to to some other time, usually to the moment of speaking. Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation. Note that according to (1) the semantic contribution of a tense may be determined in relation to the utterance time (= the moment of speaking) though this is not obligatory. The ... log in or subscribe to read full text