A Study on Tense, Aspect and Voice in Modern Japanese

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1 During this period we have been concerned about the relationships between tense, aspect and voice in Modern Japanese. Main results were as follows :(a) The perfect aspect is manifested in Modern Japanese by site-iru (site-ita) form and sita form. The perfect aspect partakes of both tense and aspect.(b) The morphological opposition suru/sita incorporates both (absolute or relative) tense and aspect. Although Japanese finite verb forms have absolute time reference in nearly all instances, non-finite verb forms have relative time reference or aspectual distinctions.(c) There are certain correlations between resultative aspect and passive (or reflexive) voice. In particular sarete-iru form combines together expressions of resultative aspect and passive voice.2 In contrastive linguistic analysis, a database of errors in compositions written by Korean students, using a personal computer. Two points were clarified about errors of tense and aspect as follows :(a) These errors are classified broadly into two types ; developmental errors caused by the lack of learner's Japanese proficiency, and interference errors caused by the differences of tense-aspect systems between Korean and Japanese.(b) Most of errors are developmental errors. Interference errors are not many except the case ru-form is used instead of te-iru form.3 Some experiments were carried out to analyze the children's usage of tenses. The main results were as follows :(a) The tenses children used varied (1) with the actions of persons (i, e. whether they are static or dynamic) that would be expressed, and (2) with the methods of experiments (i. e. oral responses or written responses).(b) In the early stage the subjects preferred present tense, later they used mostly past tense when they expressed a story.