A study of Japanese aspect : from its communicative functions

Abstract

When a person linguistically describes a situation where it started raining, it is possible to describe it in Japanese with at least three different sentences: ( 1) ame qa furi-hajime- ta. ( 2) ame qa furi- dashi- ta, and ( 3 ) ame qa fut-te ki-ta . Morphologically the former two sentence involve compound verbs such as furi-dasu and furi-hajimeru and the last sentence involves a combination of te conjunction and kuru aspectual auxiliary verb. The question which arises here, however, is whether depending on the context the speaker distinguishes these three sentences: whether these formally different sentences indicate the speaker's different ways of perceiving the situation.