Syntactic Representation of Verbal Aspect : A Study based on English, the Tokyo Dialect and the Northern Kyushu Dialect

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Based on Vendler-Dowty verbal classification, I made comparison among the forms of progressive and perfect aspects of the Tokyo dialect, the Northern Kyushu dialect, English and Korean. As a result, the Northern Kyushu dialect, which has two distinct forms for these aspects, behaves similarly with English in interpretation. In particular, a near-future interpretation of achievement verb plus "progressive morpheme, is absent in the Tokyo dialect but existent in the Northern Kyushu dialect and English. This is precisely due to the fact that while these languages have two distinct forms for progressive and perfect, the Tokyo dialect has only one form -te i-ru. Adopting Ritter and Rosen's mechanism of syntactic representation, I proposed a mechanism for licensing such aspects in terms of syntaxI made a detailed analysis on the peculiar existence of progressives and perfects of so-called "stateverbs" in the sense of Kindaichi (1976), and argued that by positing an event position associated with some "event nominals" and a mechanism of "event transfer" to these verbs, we can explain these facts.In addition, Korean ess expresses past tense, perfect aspect, or evidentiality aspect, depending on the class of verb it attaches to. Through further comparison between these languages and the Tohoku dialect of Japanese, it has become clear that there is a division of labor between tense, aspect and modality in relation with existence/absence of particular forms. Specifically, Korean and the Tohoku dialect share a common characteristics of doubling of past tense, which shows indirect evidentiality.These results were presented at the International Conference of the Linguistic Society of Korea, the 22nd Annual Conference of the English Linguistic Society of Japan, and the 11th and 12th Harvard International Symposium on Korean Linguistics.