2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
A study on Information Structure of the English perfect and temporal adverbials
| Project/Area Number |
26370567
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Wakayama University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | 現在完了形 / 時の副詞句 / 継続用法 / 非継続用法 / 情報構造 / 対照主題 / 英語 |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
The English perfect can have multiple interpretations. Previous studies have regarded the co-occurrence of those interpretations with temporal adverbials such as for-adverbials and since-adverbials and the correlation between the interpretations and the sentential positions of those adverbials as evidence for the ambiguity of the perfect. This study looks at naturally occurring language data and shows that the correlation between the interpretations of the English present perfect and those temporal adverbial phrases are merely pragmatic tendencies. It also shows that the tendencies can be explained based on the information structure. That is, the temporal adverbials in sentence-initial position are regarded as frame setting topics, which also function as contrastive topics. This contrastive topicality causes strong pragmatic tendencies in the interpretations of the present perfect.
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| Free Research Field |
言語学
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