Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

138 Workshops
References
Abraham, W. 2005. Event arguments and modal verbs. C. Maienborn & A Wöllstein (eds.).
Event arguments: foundations and applications, 243-276. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Borsley, R. and J. Kornfilt (2000). Mixed and Extended Projections. In: R. Borsley (ed.) The
Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories; Syntax and Semantics 32, 101-131. San
Diego: Academic Press.
Hopper, P.J. and S.A. Thompson. (1980). Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse. Language
56, 251-299.
Malchukov, A. 2004. Nominalization/verbalization: constraining a typology of transcategorial
operations. München: Lincom.
Aspect and modality in the Japanese verbal system
Narrog, Heiko
Tohoku U, Japan
narrog@gmail.com
Japanese is a language which throughout her documented history has had a rich system of
grammatical aspect and modality, but no overt marking of lexical aspect. Furthermore, while
in Old Japanese some modal markers were conspicuously polyfunctional, in the modern
language the expression of deontic and epistemic modalities is strictly separate.
In this paper, I wish to present an overview of the interaction of aspect and modality in the
Modern Japanese verbal system, with an excursion into diachrony. I will show that in this
language (1) all types of modality are independent of grammatical aspect, that is, are basegenerated
in different structural positions; (2) both deontic and epistemic modality are basegenerated
at higher positions than aspectual positions; (3) there are at least two positions at
which modal markers are generated, one lower than T (MP1), and one higher than T (MP2).
The former includes expressions of all types of modality (deontic, epistemic, evidential,
volitional), and both suffixes and periphrastic cnstructions, while the latter only includes
expressions of epistemic and evidential modality which are morphologically suffixes (In
agglutinative Japanese, suffixes and periphrastic constructions correspond to modal verbs in
Germanic languages. Adverbs are excluded from the considerations here). That is, the
categories of the IP mentioned here stand in the following relationship to each other:
[MP2[TP[MP1[ASPP [(vP)]]]]]. Now, crucially, both deontic and epistemic modalities are basically
unrestricted in their interaction with perfective and imperfective aspectuality asillustrated in
the following examples, (1)-(4):
1. Perfective ASP + deontic M:
Kimi-wa [TP [MP1 [ASPP [sore-o haya-ku wasure]te simaw]anakerebanarana] i]
you-TOP that-ACC quick-ADVforget-GERPRF DEO -NPST
‘You must forget that quickly’ (deontic)
2. Perfective ASP + epistemic M:
Kimi-wa [MP2 [TP [ASPP [ sore-o haya-ku wasure]te sima(w)] u]daroo]
you-TOP that-ACC quick-ADV forget-GER PRF-NPST EPI
‘You’ll surely forget that quickly’ (epistemic)