Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The counterpart of the utterance time

   This presentaion is an attempt to give a discourse management account of a Japanese deictic time noun imagoro, a compound noun consisting of ima (now) and koro (a time identifier).'  Imagoro can combine with periodic deictic time nouns like asita (tomorrow), rainen (next year), and gives the value of the time that ima gets with respect to the period expressed by the time noun to which ima-goro attaches, yielding the interpretation e.g. asita no imagoro (about this time tomorrow), rainen no imagoro (about this time next year).

   To get the relevant interpretation of imagoro, we have to have at least the following:

1)  The scalar temporal structure against which ima is evaluated: day, months, year.

2)  The assignment of time value to ima with respect to (1) , i.e. 'today', 'this month', 'this year'.

3)  The assignment of time value to imagoro with respect to parallel temporal structure in (1), i.e. 'tomorrow', 'next month', 'next year'.

Imagorocan thus be thought of as giving the same time value that ima gets in parallel time period.

    I further demonstrate that the licensing conditions based on the parallel structure can naturally be extended to the cases of imagoro used in modal structure and counterfactual conditionals, suggesting that they also involve a parallel temporal structure in these cases.  I will argue that the data involved can be accounted for by the semantics of imagoro given in (1-3) and a function f mapping points of time to events, serving as a modal base. .

I will also discuss the strange behavior of imagoro in evidential modals, where theimagoro is to be interpreted as referring to the utterance time rather than its counterpart. I propose to account for the data by making use of a reverse function f^-1 mapping events to time points.