Abstract
This paper discusses the fake past tense morphology used for present state in Japanese (Teramura 1984; Iatridou 2000). Unlike Korean and other languages, the past tense marker “ta” can express an unexpected finding or remembrance at the time of speech (Inoue and Ubukoshi 1997). I claim that this construction corresponds to subjunctive conditionals with a covert negative antecedent, and that counterfactuality is involved in such non-past past tense, even though the proposition expressed is factual. It is comparable to the counterfactual analysis of factive emotive predicates such as “sorry”and “glad”(Heim 1992; Giorgi and Pianesi 1997). I show that non-past past construction updates the information state, and revises the context.
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Nishiguchi, S. (2007). Temporal Dynamic Semantics of Factual Counterfactuals. In: Sakurai, A., Hasida, K., Nitta, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI JSAI 2003 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3609. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_41
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