Event Structure of Japanese Progresultive Aspect

The current paper proposes a theoretical account of Japenese Progresultive aspect (further referred to as -te i- form) within event semantics. The form combines progressive, resultative, experiential and habitual readings, which is typologically uncommon. While existing accounts reduce these readings to different phenomena such as argument structure, temporal properties or pragmatic underspecification, the syntactic structure of the form remains uncovered in the literature. Although some observations about syntax have been made (Kaufmann 2020), the evidence is still far from satisfying. The current work aims to fill this gap by proposing an account within a theory of syntax-semantics interface. The focus is the form’s interplay with event structure. The event structure of the form has been addressed in Ogihara’s work (1998) but an analysis that is sensitive to both event and argument structure is yet to be devised. Such an account is feasible within First-Phase Syntax framework (Ramchand 2007, 2018), a theory that postulates verbal decomposition in syntax. Moreover, the research takes a move forward by taking into account broad range of data from both corpus and elicitation. Another innovation of current approach is attention to information structure, which at least contributes to description of pragmatic restrictions that -te i- form has.