IULC Publications

Temporal Reference in English and Japanese

By Toshiyuki Ogihara

Toshiyuki Ogihara investigates the behavior of tense morphemes in complex sentences in English and Japanese. In the first half of the dissertation he discusses the so-called sequence-of-tense phenomenon in English and the lack of a comparable phenomenon in Japanese. He claims that this difference between the two languages can be accounted for by positing a tense deletion rule (in the spirit of the traditional sequence-of-tense rule) for English which applies at Logical Form after the rule for Quantifier Raising applies. By localizing the difference between the two languages in syntax, the semantics of tense can be dealt with in a unified and straightforward manner. In the second half of the dissertation, the author treats the "double-access" reading associated with such sentences John said that Mary is pregnant (as opposed to John said that Mary was pregnant (at that time)). It is claimed that this type of sentence involves a de re attitude report on a state or event. This view presupposes a Davidsonian framework in which a declarative sentence is assumed to make an existential assertion about a state or event.

210 pages
$10.00

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