A Fundamental Study of Rules for composing Tense Structure of Japanese Complex Sentence

Abstract

Tense structure plays an important role in determining the temporal relation between the events and states mentioned in narrative text. We generally call events and states situations. This paper focuses on the tense structures of complex sentences in Japanese narrative text. The sentence investigated in this paper contains two clauses (a main clause and a sub clause) connected by a temporal/causal connective, and the sub clause is subordinate to or coordinate with the main clause. The tense structure of a clause is described by the following three entities : the time interval of the situation, denoted by "I", the time of speech, denoted by "S", and the time of reference, denoted by "R". Most of the works on tense structures are based on Reichenbach's notions of three times : the event time (E), the speech time (S), and the reference time (R). In this paper, we use the time interval (I) instead of the event time (E). This facilitates more flexible compositions of the tense structures of complex sentences. We propose a set of rules for composing the tense structure of the complex sentence which contains two clauses. In the combined tense structure of the sentence with a subordinate clause, the speech time is the speech time of the main clause and the reference time of the situation of the subordinate clause is located in the time interval of the situation of the main clause. This composition is based on the result of the linguistic work on the tense structures of Japanese complex sentences. Our idea of locating the reference time of the situation of the subordinate clause in the time interval of the situation of the main clause is compared with some other theories of the tense structures.