A Proposal concerning Japanese Verbal Aspect

Abstract

A modal system of a grammar is set up to represent in what mood, in what emotional state, in what aspect and in what concept of a speaker expresses some event. Each of these constitutes a modal category with a lexical exponent in a total modal network. Grammatical tenses in Japanese represented by such morphemes as u ta, oo are the linguistic forms of a Japanese speaker's particular concept of time. That is to say, each language seems to have developed some convenient frame of reference with regard to time, mood, aspect to fix the content of its speaker's utterances in a concrete manner. Let us concentrate on the concept for the present. Tense in a grammar is just a descriptive device to formalize how a language speaker cuts up the universal property time into finite divisions so that a speaker may specify a certain event with respect to a particular point of time. Since it seems uncertain if anything like universal grammatical categories can be obtained, I would assume that speakers of each language have developed their own frame of temporal reference or tense system. Then there is not much reason for applying the tense system of some other languages to Japanese through superficial analogy. As a matter of fact, some curious facts are realized as we add temporal adverbs of present, past and future to the above sentences: