A discourse-semantic analysis of tense and aspect in English and Japanese

This dissertation investigates the English and Japanese tense and aspect systems from a discourse-semantic perspective in formal frameworks, DRT (Discourse Representation Theory, Kamp and Reyle 1993) and DAT (Dynamic Aspect Trees, ter Meulen 1995). Investigated are: English present perfect and progressive, and Japanese ta and tei-ru constructions. A discourse-semantic perspective sheds new light on the semantics of the constructions under investigation, which has been left open in both sentence-level semantics and pragmatics. A contrastive perspective is another key component of my analysis. Based on the investigations of related constructions, I contrast the tense and aspect systems in the two languages.;I illustrate that English present perfect (PresPerf) is characterized as a tense, rather than an aspect, based on the discourse representational notion "temporal location" (TLoc) I define and identify as the determinant of tense. A unified semantics of PresPerf is provided formally, which is then incorporated into the formal devices DRT and DAT. The present progressive is claimed from a semantic/pragmatic perspective as having as its input the predicate type (e.g. 'to build a house'), therefore it is a VP-modifier, and as its output a state, refuting the common semantic account that it is a S-modifier.;Japanese ta and tei-ru constructions are analyzed systematically in relation to the general "Aspect (O/tei)-Tense (ru/ta)" scheme in Japanese. The ta morpheme is claimed to be unambiguous and its two-way meaning (simple past and perfective aspect) is attributed to the compositional involvement of ta and temporal adverbials. The tei-ru (State-Nonpast) construction is analyzed in a two-layer model: the tei morpheme itself is simply a stativizer and various meanings yielded by the sentences are accounted for compositionally in terms of the lexical semantics of the modified verb and coocurring adverbials. The proposed two-layer model is shown to be a breakthrough to a set of problems left open in the literature.;The contrastive analysis of the two languages with the fundamentally different tense/aspect systems contributes to the analysis of each and serves as basis for a more general crosslinguistic study.