Diachrony, Synchrony, and Typology of Tense and Aspect in Old Japanese

Diachrony, Synchrony, and Typology of Tense and Aspect in Old Japanese reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese, which until now had not been examined using the tools of contemporary linguistic theory. Kazuha Watanabe analyzes syntactic distribution of the temporal suffixes in the Man'yōshū, an eighth-century poetry collection, and compares the results with data from well-attested languages. The author then integrates the semantic property of each suffix into the ov