Tense and Settledness in Japanese Conditionals

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the non-factuality encoded by conditional constructions through some phenomena regarding temporal and modal dimensions in Japanese. We will show that, unlike English, Japanese has grammatical markers of epistemic conditionals.2 Epistemic conditionals are one of three types of conditionals discussed in this chapter, along with predictive and counterfactual ones. Under the framework developed in this study, we argue that the antecedent in epistemic conditionals is settled, but the speaker does not know its truth value. What we mean by ‘settled’ is that the truth value of a proposition is already determined at the time of utterance. We demonstrate the existence of grammatical markers of epistemic conditionals in Japanese to argue that either the semantic notion of settledness or the fact that the speaker does not know the truth, or both of them, play an essential role in the grammar of conditionals in Japanese. In the following section, we point out that the aspect marker, -tei-, when occurring in the antecedent clause of Japanese epistemic conditionals, plays the role of settledness marker.KeywordsMatrix ClauseJapanese EconomyCounterfactual ConditionalConditional FormTemporal InterpretationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.