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Paper short abstract:

This study presents a typology of Japanese temporal description strategies. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses of experimental data suggest that there are four description strategies: Linear Limited Time, Non-limited Linear Time, Endless Linear Time, Non-Linear Time.

Paper long abstract:

A solid body of theoretical and empirical work on temporal description has been written over the last two decades (e.g. Evans 2003; Klein 1994; Tenbrink 2011). However, in the context of global scholarship, strategies of Japanese temporal description remain predominantly terra incognita, which leads to the representation of time and temporal description strategies in Japanese as a number of separate cultural, social and linguistic phenomena.

This work presents the results of qualitative and quantitative analyses of a corpus of 150 texts obtained from 50 Japanese native speaking participants through a spontaneous speech experiment on temporal description strategies.

Qualitative analysis of the corpus allowed formulating a typology of temporal description strategies in contemporary Japanese as having four distinct strategies defined as 1) Linear Limited Time - a sequence of events is described with the main emphasis on the ending point/completion of the temporal change; 2) Non-limited Linear Time is such strategy where the description focuses on the contents of the events with no marked start and end points of events; 3) Endless Linear Time descriptions are focused on the starting point of the temporal process/change and leave the end "open" as if the change is ongoing or the speaker perceives it as an ongoing; 4) in Non-Linear strategy the speaker tends to utilize more temporally extended cyclical, e.g., seasons, positional terms for the sequences of more concrete or shorter events.

The results of the study form the basis of the systematic description of temporal conceptualization in contemporary Japanese and confirm the suggestions of the previous studies (e.g. Shinohara and Pardeshi 2011) about a unique position of seasonal time in the conceptualization of time in Japanese.

References

Evans, Vyvyan. 2003. The structure of time: language, meaning, and temporal cognition. Human Cognitive Processing. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.

Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge.

Shinohara, Kazuko, and Prashant Pardeshi. 2011. "The more in front, the later: The role of positional terms in time metaphors." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (749-758).

Tenbrink, Thora. 2011. "Reference frames of space and time in language." Journal of Pragmatics 43: 704-22.