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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on February 10, 2006
Journal of Semantics 2006 23(2):185-216; doi:10.1093/jos/ffh036
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Meaning and Interpretations of the Japanese Aspect Marker -te-i-

Atsuko Nishiyama

University at Buffalo, the State University of New York

Correspondence: ATSUKO NISHIYAMA, Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 atsuko.nishiyama{at}gmail.com

The Japanese marker -te-i- can have progressive, resultative, and existential perfect readings and has often been regarded as ambiguous. This paper shows that there is no clear evidence that -te-i- is ambiguous. It proposes a monosemous analysis of -te-i- that unifies its multiple readings and shows how progressives and perfects can form a natural semantic class. Within the context of a Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993, de Swart 1998), I propose that -te-i- consists of an imperfective operator -te- and a stativizer -i-. The imperfective operator -te- takes an eventuality as its argument and outputs a (non-necessarily proper) subpart of the eventuality, which precedes a reference time interval. Secondly, a stativizer -i- maps the subpart of the eventuality, i.e. -te-'s output, onto a state which overlaps with reference time and whose category is semantically underspecified and is determined via pragmatic inferences. The vague output of the imperfective operator, i.e. whether it is a proper subpart or nonproper subpart of an eventuality, leads to the contrast between progressive readings and perfect readings of -te-i-.


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