Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the non-factuality encoded by conditional constructions through some phenomena regarding temporal and modal dimensions in Japanese. We will show that, unlike English, Japanese has grammatical markers of epistemic conditionals.2 Epistemic conditionals are one of three types of conditionals discussed in this chapter, along with predictive and counterfactual ones. Under the framework developed in this study, we argue that the antecedent in epistemic conditionals is settled, but the speaker does not know its truth value. What we mean by ‘settled’ is that the truth value of a proposition is already determined at the time of utterance. We demonstrate the existence of grammatical markers of epistemic conditionals in Japanese to argue that either the semantic notion of settledness or the fact that the speaker does not know the truth, or both of them, play an essential role in the grammar of conditionals in Japanese. In the following section, we point out that the aspect marker, -tei-, when occurring in the antecedent clause of Japanese epistemic conditionals, plays the role of settledness marker.
This project is partly supported by a grant-in-aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). I gratefully acknowledge the hospitality of Professor Stefan Kaufmann and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) during my term as a Visiting Researcher at Northwestern University, where much of this work was carried out.
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© 2009 Setsuko Arita
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Arita, S. (2009). Tense and Settledness in Japanese Conditionals. In: Pizziconi, B., Kizu, M. (eds) Japanese Modality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245754_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245754_6
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