The Meaning and Interpretations of the Japanese Aspect Marker -te-i-

The Japanese marker -te-i- can have progressive, resultative, and existential perfect readings and has often been regarded as ambiguous. This paper shows that there is no clear evidence that -te-i- is ambiguous. It proposes a monosemous analysis of-te-i- that unifies its multiple readings and shows how progressives and perfects can form a natural semantic class. Within the context of a Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993, de Swart 1998), I propose that -te-i- consists of an imperfective operator -te- and a stativizer -i-. The imperfective operator -te- takes an eventuality as its argument and outputs a (non-necessarily proper) subpart of the eventuality, which precedes a reference time interval. Secondly, a stativizer -i- maps the subpart of the eventuality, i.e. -te-'s output, onto a state which overlaps with reference time and whose category is semantically underspecified and is determined via pragmatic inferences. The vague output of the imperfective operator, i.e. whether it is a proper subpart or nonproper subpart of an eventuality, leads to the contrast between progressive readings and perfect readings of-te-i-.

[1]  Alexander Nakhimovsky,et al.  Aspect, Aspectual Class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative , 1988, Comput. Linguistics.

[2]  W. Jacobsen The transitive structure of events in Japanese , 1995 .

[3]  A. Kratzer The Notional Category of Modality , 2008 .

[4]  Michael Herweg Perfective and imperfective aspect and the theory of events and states , 1991 .

[5]  Toshiyuki Ogihara,et al.  Tense, attitudes, and scope , 1995 .

[6]  Wolfgang Klein,et al.  An analysis of the German perfekt , 2000 .

[7]  M. Garman,et al.  Tense and aspect , 1986 .

[8]  Reinhard Muskens,et al.  Tense and the logic of change , 1995 .

[9]  H. Verkuyl Aspectual Issues: Studies on Time and Quantity , 1999 .

[10]  Laura A. Michaelis Aspectual grammar and past-time reference , 1998 .

[11]  Uwe Reyle,et al.  From discourse to logic , 1993 .

[12]  Ilse Depraetere,et al.  On the necessity of distinguishing between (un)boundedness and (a)telicity , 1995 .

[13]  Stephen Nightingale,et al.  Polysemy and homonymy in Japanese verbal alternations , 2000 .

[14]  Thanh Nyan Metalinguistic Operators with Reference to French , 1998 .

[15]  George Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , 1987 .

[16]  Michael Herweg,et al.  A Critical Examination of Two Classical Approaches to Aspect , 1991, J. Semant..

[17]  M. Krifka The Origins of Telicity , 1998 .

[18]  R. Binnick Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect , 1991 .

[19]  Marianne Celce-Murcia,et al.  The English perfect : tense-choice and pragmatic inferences , 1978 .

[20]  T. Ogihara,et al.  The Ambiguity of the -te iru form in Japanese , 1998 .

[21]  Zeno Vendler,et al.  Verbs and Times , 1957, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[22]  Manfred Krifka,et al.  Nominal Reference, Temporal Constitution and Quantification in Event Semantics , 1989 .

[23]  Jan van Eijck,et al.  Representing Discourse in Context , 1997, Handbook of Logic and Language.

[24]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  Japanese Enter/Exit Verbs Without Motion Semantics , 1999 .

[25]  Sebastian Löbner IS THE GERMAN PERFEKT A PERFECT PERFECT , 2002 .

[26]  J Vanbenthem,et al.  The Logic of Aspect: An Axiomatic Approach , 1984 .

[27]  Haythem O. Ismail Reasoning and Acting in Time , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[28]  Yasuhiro Shirai,et al.  Where the Progressive and the Resultative Meet , 1998 .

[29]  Akira Ishikawa,et al.  Complex predicates and lexical operations in Japanese , 1988 .

[30]  Henriëtte de Swart,et al.  Aspect shift and coercion , 1998 .

[31]  Yoko Hasegawa,et al.  A study of Japanese clause linkage : the connective TE in Japanese , 1996 .

[32]  B. Partee Nominal and temporal anaphora , 1984 .

[33]  P. Portner,et al.  The Progressive in Modal Semantics. , 1998 .

[34]  Wolfgang Klein,et al.  Time in language , 1994 .

[35]  Linda R. Waugh,et al.  Marking Time With The Passé Composé: Toward a Theory of the Perfect , 1987 .

[36]  Alice ter Meulen,et al.  Genericity: An Introduction , 1995 .

[37]  Jean-Pierre Koenig,et al.  How to End Without Ever Finishing: Thai Semi-perfectivity , 2000, J. Semant..

[38]  D. McDermott A Temporal Logic for Reasoning About Processes and Plans , 1982, Cogn. Sci..

[39]  R. Boogaart,et al.  Aspect and temporal ordering: A constrastive analysis of Dutch and English , 1999 .

[40]  David R. Dowty Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in M , 1979 .

[41]  William McClure,et al.  Syntactic projections of the semantics of aspect , 1994 .

[42]  Wesley M. Jacobsen,et al.  Tense and Aspect in Modern Colloquial Japanese , 2002 .

[43]  Stephen Pulman,et al.  Flexible semantics for reinterpretation phenomena , 2005 .

[44]  Yasuhiro Shirai,et al.  The semantics of the Japanese imperfective -teiru: An integrative approach , 2000 .

[45]  David R. Dowty,et al.  Word Meaning and Montague Grammar , 1979 .

[46]  L. Talmy Toward a Cognitive Semantics , 2003 .