Tense And Aspect In Japanese And English

This work aims at a contrastive investigation of the tense and aspect in Japanese and English, placing emphasis on formal solutions of problems which are applicable to machine translation, based on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Discourse Representation Theory. After formulating DRS's for Japanese predicates with and without te iru, it addresses the issue of how to resolve the ambiguity in terms of the aspectual meanings in te iru-marked sentences. Then the problem of Consecutio Temporum (sequence of tense) is discussed on the basis of a four-layered syntactic hierarchy. Lastly, the result of an implementation of the rules proposed in the preceding part of the work is exhibited.

Going beyond what has been previously written on tense and aspect in general and concerning Japanese in particular, this work lays the foundation for a systematization of aspectual categories on the basis of realized versus unrealized rather than completive and incompletive categories. Clearly presented and substantially documented, the material in this book makes a significant and original contribution to the study of Japanese linguistics.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

This study integrates three independent subjects - translation theory, Mandarin aspect, and Greek aspect - for the purpose of formulating a working theory applicable to translating the Bible. The primary objectives are defined in terms of grammatical translation of Greek aspect into Mandarin aspect at the discourse level. A historical overview of the Chinese Bible is provided as a way of introducing major translation issues related to linguistic, conceptual, and logistical challenges. The proposed theory provides the translator with a powerful tool, which is tested in two sample passages from John 18-19 and 1 Corinthians 15. Provided, also, are critical reviews of over sixty Chinese Bible versions, Nestorian, Manichaean, Catholic documents, and a translation written according to the proposed theory.

Diachrony, Synchrony, and Typology of Tense and Aspect in Old Japanese reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese, which until now had not been examined using the tools of contemporary linguistic theory. Kazuha Watanabe analyzes syntactic distribution of the temporal suffixes in the Man'yōshū, an eighth-century poetry collection, and compares the results with data from well-attested languages. The author then integrates the semantic property of each suffix into the overall synchronic tense-aspect system of Old Japanese. Watanabe further compares the reconstructed system with the distributions of the same suffixes in Early Modern Japanese using Genji Monogatari, an eleventh-century novel, in order to provide further support for the synchronic analysis of Old Japanese. This approach is fundamentally different from traditional analyses, which identify the meanings of the temporal suffixes based on contextual information. In addition, previous analyses have produced a uniform analysis covering the entire 700-year period from Old to Early Modern Japanese. Instead, Watanabe proposes that Old Japanese had a temporal system distinct from the later period.

This title explains the use of Japanese words such as wa, ga and mo looking at the rules and meanings of words in their literary forms.