The Temporal System in Japanese

Abstract

Tense and aspect are among the most fundamental and complicated fields of research in linguistics. Thus temporal properties of Japanese verb(al)s have also attracted a lot of attention in traditional and generative linguistics (see Kindaichi 1976 and Inoue 1976, to name just two). Most of the previous treatments were, however, either informal in nature or based on primitives that were given only intuitionistic descriptions, such as subjective judgments of the speaker or the tendency of an object to keep the ongoing status.