A grammar of time reference and tense in Early Middle Japanese

Thesis

This description of time reference and tense marking in Early Middle Japanese is the first of its kind, as it addresses a fundamental question: "Is Early Middle Japanese (EMJ) a tenseless or a tensed language?".

For over 125 years, from the publication of the Classical Japanese grammar by Aston (1877) to that of the more recent grammar by Vovin (2003), the prevailing approach among philologists had been to present EMJ verbal morphology as a catalogue of individual morphemes, avoiding the bigger more fundamental question that concerned its basic characterisation as a system of paradigmatic distinctions.

This dissertation is the first to analyse the EMJ verbal morphology involved in time reference, as a system comprising verb forms that fit in together to form a cohesive tense(less)-aspect system.

In this system, the default expression of both present and past time reference is tenseless predicates. Past or present time reference is determined pragmatically by boundedness; reference to a temporal boundary. Even so, past tense may be marked on predicates, optionally, when the pastness of the situation is a salient communicative point, and, hence, prompts discontinuity inferences: "that was the case (before, but not now)", "they promised (at the time, but did not keep the promise)". These inferences accompany a significant number of instances of -(i)ki, and had so far gone unnoticed in the philological literature.

This dissertation represents an important advancement in the linguistic description of pre-modern Japanese. It is also a description of unprecedented detail, of a historical tenseless system and its pragmatics, and the only description of optional past tense marking in a dead language.

Besides its descriptive and theoretical value, the practical application of this research shows promise in improving how Classical Japanese is taught and translated, reducing the need to rely on intuition and contextual information.

Authors: Manglavite, F

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gpgwyxe6y
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English, Classical Japanese
• Keywords: boundedness; past tense; indirective past; Early Middle Japanese; -(i)ker-; unmarked predicates; discontinuous past; evidential past; pre-modern Japanese; -(i)ki; kako to kanryō no jodoshi; unmarked verbs; bare verbs; Classical Japanese; temporal boundedness; optional past; premodern Japanese; time reference; bare predicates; Implicit type-shifting (coercion)
• Subjects: Japanese language--Grammar, Classical; Japanese language--Writing--Kana; Kana literature; Morphology (Linguistics); Historical linguistics; Japanese philology; Tense (Grammar); Semantics, Historical; Pragmatics; Evidentials (Linguistics); Typology (Linguistics); Grammar, Comparative and general--Tense; Japanese language; Grammar, Comparative and general--Aspect; Corpora (Linguistics)