2008 Volume 4 Issue 4 Pages 32-47
The aim of this paper is to compare past and retrospective expressions in Tohoku Japanese and Korean. Both of the two languages have a complex past form -tatta (TJ)/-essess-ta (K), in addition to a simpler past form of -ta (TJ)/-ess-ta (K). Unlike the simpler type, the complex past forms have the following features: (i) they indicate that the result of an action doesn't hold at the speech time, (ii) they are interpreted that the speaker directly experienced/perceived an event, (iii) in toki/ttay 'when' clauses, they don't represent the resultant situation beyond a delimited point, and (iv) they are often used in counter-factual conditionals. I attribute these features to the fact that these forms are originated from -te atta/-e iss-ess-ta, respectively, both of which have the form of "the conjunctive form + the past form of the existential verb", both of which mark the durative past, and inherited the contextual meanings of the older forms. -essess-ta and -tatta differ in the following respects: (v) the former retains older usages than the latter: it indicates 'durative past', 'past perfect' and 'detection', and isn't used with the existential verb, and (vi) it is difficult to use -tatta in adjectival and nominal predicates. I explain the property (vi) as being attributable to the fact that -ke is used in those contexts. The retrospective forms -ke (TJ)/-te- (K) share the features of (i) and (ii) above. However, they differ from -tatta/-essess-ta in that they don't mark the experience of the speaker's own action, and contextually represent the 'past' and 'duration' on the basis of the past perception of the event, while -tatta/-essess-ta represent the evidential meaning contextually derived from the durative past. I claim that the reason why the two languages have both -tatta/-essess-ta and -ke/-te- is due to the fact that -ta/-ess-ta may indicate the present, and that the two languages have developed a means to clearly distinguish the past from the present.
