An Analysis of Japanese ta / teiru in a Dynamic Semantics Framework and a Comparison with Korean Temporal Markers a nohta / a twuta

In this paper I will shed new light on the semantics of Japanese tense-aspect markers ta and teiru from dynamic semantics and contrastive perspectives. The focus of investigation will be on the essential difference between ta and teiru used in an aspectual sense related to a perfect. I analyze the asymmetry between ta and teiru with empirical data and illustrate it in the DRT framework (Discourse Representation Theory: Kamp and Reyle (1993)). Defending the intuition that ta and teiru make respectively an eventive and a stative description of eventualities, I argue that ta is committed to an assertion of the triggering event whereas teiru is not. In the case of teiru, a triggering event, if there is any, is only entailed. In DRT, ta and teiru introduce respectively an event and a state as a codition into the main DRS. Teiru may introduce a triggering event only as a codition in an embedded DRS. I also illustrate how the proposed analysis of the perfect meaning fits into a more general scheme of ta and teiru. and analyze ta and teiru in a discourse. Furthermore, in DRT terms, I will compare Japanese ta / teiru with Korean perfect-related temporal markers a nohta / a twuta in light of Lee (1996).