Tense and Aspect

要旨

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.

主題