A note on so-called 'urgent imperatives' expressed by the simple past/non-past sentences : Tense and Modality interfaces in Japanese

• Arita Setsuko

  Osaka Shoin Women's University

Bibliographic Information

Other Title

• 「差し迫った命令」に関する覚え書き : 日本語のテンスとモダリティの接点

Abstract

This paper discusses how to relate the so-called "urgent imperatives" denoted by the simple past form, -ta, and the simple non-past form, -(r)u in Japanese to the temporal meanings of -ta and -ru forms. The reason they are called 'urgent' is that they cannot co-occur with any future temporal adverbs even though they are future-oriented. This phenomenon is regarded as one of the modal interpretations that the simple tense forms have in the sentence final position, which are disputable in the study of tense in Japanese grammar. In previous works, two types of approaches to the modal usages of tense have been used: one is to situate the modal usages in the temporal ones; the other is vice versa. The urgent imperatives, however, are not analyzed enough in either approach because they are apparently idiomatic. In this paper, I show that 'urgency' can be ascribed to the basic temporal meanings of -ta and -ru; that is, the immediate past denoted by -ta and the immediate future denoted by -(r)u. Though the -ta form has both immediate and remote past interpretations and also the -(r)u form has both immediate and remote future interpretations, the interpretation of these forms is limited to the immediate past/future in some particular contexts (Takubo 2008, 2011). I argue that the interpretation of -ta/-ru is limited to the immediate past/future even though they have both remote and immediate past/future interpretations. In other words, I claim that the urgent imperatives should not be treated as idiomatic but should be explained compositionally by their temporal meanings and the contexts of utterances.

Journal

• 九州大学言語学論集

  九州大学言語学論集 35 382-397, 2015

  Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Kyushu University

Keywords

• Tense
• Aspect
• Modality

Details

• CRID: 1390009224839029888
• NII Article ID: 120005624066
• NII Book ID: AA11886316
• DOI: 10.15017/1518731
• HANDLE: 2324/1518731
• Text Lang: ja
• Data Source:
  • JaLC
  • IRDB
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN
• Abstract License Flag: Allowed