Japanese Experiential -te iru as an Individual-Level Construction

Abstract

The Japanese -te iru is best known as an aspectual form that yields progressive and perfective readings. The -te iru form of an activity verb yields a progressive reading, and the -te iru form of an achievement verb yields a perfective reading. Many formal analyses of these two readings can be found in the literature (Ogihara, 1998; Shirai, 2000; Kusumoto, 2003; McClure, 2007 to name a few). However, what is often ignored is the third reading of the -te iru form, which is the experiential reading. Given certain contexts, experiential readings are available to the -te iru forms of both activity and achievement verbs. The experiential reading was first discussed in Fujii (1966), but discussion of the experiential -te iru remains descriptive (Soga, 1983). The focus of this paper is the experiential reading of the -te iru form. Specifically, I will present a formal semantic analysis of experiential -te iru. I will show that experiential -te iru has a distinct semantic representation from progressive and perfective -te iru. Essentially, while progressive and perfective -te iru represents a set of events predicated of an individual (McClure, 2007), experiential -te iru represents a set of individuals predicated of an event. Consequently, as predicates of individuals, I argue that experiential -te iru has properties that parallel those of Individual-Level Predicates (Carlson, 1977). An important implication here is that the notions Individual-Level or Stage-Level do not have to be linked to individual lexical items. Even when a Stage-Level predicate is used, a sentence as a whole can still have the properties of an Individual-Level Predicate if that sentence represents a property of a set of individuals. In this paper, I argue that experiential -te iru is an example of just such a predicate type. Experiential -te iru is an Individual-Level “Construction” because in its denotation an individual argument takes wide scope and an event argument takes narrow scope. The organization of this paper is as follows. In section 2, a descriptive discussion of the three readings of the -te iru form will be presented. In section 3, an event semantic analysis of progressive and perfective -te iru by McClure (2007) will be introduced, and based on this work, the semantics of experiential -te iru will be proposed. In section 4, the parallel between the experiential -te iru and Individual-Level Predicates will be shown. In section 5, the analysis of experiential -te iru will be extended to a general term and a logical representation of an Individual-Level Construction will be proposed.