The perfective imperative in Japanese: A further analysis

Sammanfattning: The present thesis is concerned with a descriptive analysis of a phenomenon in the Japanese language, the use as an imperative of two suffixes of tense and aspect, -ta and -tari. The use of the past tense form (or ta-form) as an imperative in modern Japanese has been touched upon by various scholars, but a detailed account of the construction, its diachrony, and its place in a cross-linguistic context has not previously been performed. These aspects of the constructions are described in detail, and a contrastive analysis determines how imperative -ta differs from other imperatives in modern Japanese. The relation between aspect and imperative utterances manifested in imperative -ta is discussed, focusing on the connection between imperative -ta and perfective aspect. The discussion also focuses on the occurrence of past tense and perfective imperatives cross-linguistically. These phenomena are connected through the concept of deictic projection (Lyons 1977, Tavangar and Amouzadeh 2006).