Shigeru SATO, Hajime FUKUCHI, and Kan'iti ITAGAKI
Graduate Schools of Intercultural Studies and Information Sciences,
Tohoku University
Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-77, JAPAN
e-mail: satos@intcul.tohoku.ac.jp
The dialogue is the basic mode in the use of language in which a common
pragmatic field of cognition is assumed between the speaker and the hearer.
For it to take place, mutual understanding of spatiotemporal deixis is
indispensable, where the default values in the speaker are "me-now-here".
Clarification of the nature of the constraints imposed on such a field and of
the departure from these values directly contributes to the understanding of
dialogue construction. For instance, we are interested in the time-space
where the following pairs of expressions are generated with contrastive
tense markers: "Arigatou gozaimasu/gozaimasita." and "It's nice to meet
you./It was nice meeting you." What is it that motivates the choice of these
tense expressions? With our final goal in mind to construct a model of
temporal deixis generation, we report here the results of the following two
subgoals: [1] Occurrence of case particle "ni" attached to time nouns, and
[2] Functions of tense markers in scene-depicting text.
In [1] we have found the following. Particle "ni" does not co-occur with
proximal deictic expressions, nor with absolute expressions used to replace
proximal deixis. Proximity to "now" brings about the sense of temporal
duration, which seems to prevent the occurrence of "ni". We have also seen
some cases where "ni" is suppressed even in non-deictic context if
duration is implied by that expression. Thus, the direct cause of "ni"
suppression is not the relativity of the time noun, but the sense of duration
it embodies. A natural agreement between the speaker and the hearer is
that explicit forms take shape in a dialogue only when they find it difficult
to identify what the other side has brought up. Thinking that the occurrence
of "ni" may also be affected by this principle, we attempt to further this
topic, making use of the notion of iconic motivation in cognitive linguistics
that relates linguistic expressions to the world of concept.
[2] investigates cognitive functions the Japanese tense markers bear in
simplex sentences in scene-depicting text. The predicate classes are
defined as the action, transition, and state predicates, where, within a
certain span of time in the past, the first and second are time-dependent,
and the last time-invariant. After an analysis of the text by various
contemporary writers, the findings are that the combination of
action/transition predicates and the past tense marker creates a time
flow by activating scenes. In the mean time, spatial elaboration is taken
care of by state predicates using both the present and past tense markers.
While the present tense as a whole renders spatial description of the scene
activated by the past tense of the preceding action/transition predicate,
the state predicate plus a past tense marker seems to signal the change
in the focus of attention in the situation in the particular time frame.
Keywords: time noun, tense marker, proximal deixis, action / transition / state predicates