Abstract
Most natural language sentences are tensed in that they carry with them some information about time. In many languages, this information is indicated by overt morphemes called tense morphemes. In this book, I will be concerned with the semantics of tense in natural language. What are possible tense systems in natural language? What variations are observed, and what accounts for such variations? Are there language universals regarding tense? I will address such questions by paying particular attention to tense morphemes in embedded clauses. This book is also an attempt to conduct “comparative semantics” by drawing examples from English and Japanese. In order to provide the reader with a sense of perspective, let me make a short introductory statement about the theoretical position to be defended in this book.
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Notes
The terms “relative tense” and “absolute tense” are due to Comrie (1985).
The past tense morpheme in Japanese is also suffixed to so-called adjectives (keeyoosi) and adjectival verbs (keeyoo-doosi), as in the following examples: (i) [utukusii is an adjective (keeyoosi).] Sono a-wa utukusikat-ta. that picture-TOP beautiful- PAST ‘That picture was beautiful.’ (ii) [kenkooda is an adjectival verb (keeyoo-doosi).] Titi-wa kenkoodat-ta. father-TOP healthy-PAST ‘My father was healthy.’
The terms “event” and “state” will be used in an informal and pre-theoretical manner until they are defined formally in Chapter 6.
Binary tense systems are common among the world’s languages (Comrie 1985:49).
My proposal is much more complicated than what this informal description indicates. For example, the SOT rule I will propose also applies to a present tense that is in the scope of a higher present tense. Please refer to Chapter 4 for details.
The expression “relativized NP” (or “relative clause NP”) will be used in this book to refer to an NP that contains a relative clause.
Scoping the NP to the complement clause level does not predict the intended interpretation, either.
The diagrams represent my view of how these two narratives should be analyzed.
See Soga (1983).
This may explain why Montague (1973) regards the present perfect as the English construction that corresponds to the past tense operator in Intensional Logic (IL), which simply quantifies over past times. Bennett and Partee (1972) consider this possibility.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Ogihara, T. (1996). Introduction. In: Tense, Attitudes, and Scope. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8609-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8609-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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