Márton Tóth, a PhD student in Nordic Languages, talks about his ongoing research. All interested are welcome to this seminar hosted by the research area Linguistic Structures!
In this talk I present a contrastive corpus study on Swedish and Japanese.
My main object of study is the Swedish present perfect, e.g. har ätit ‘have eaten’ and its correspondences in Japanese. Japanese does not have a direct equivalent to the Swedish present perfect but has past and non-past tenses that also indicate aspect. According to the literature, the Japanese past perfective -ta and the non-past imperfective -teiru are the tense-aspect forms that most closely correspond to the present perfects in Swedish and English (Kudou 1995, Tóth 2020, Masciolini & Tóth (in press)).
Based on the findings of the study, I discuss similarities and differences between the tense-aspect systems of Swedish and Japanese.
Kudou, Mayumi. 1995. Asupekuto-tensu taikei to tekusuto [Aspect-Tense System and Text]. Tōkyō, Japan: Hitsuji Shobō.
Masciolini, A., Lange, H., & Tóth, M. A. (In press). Exploring parallel corpora with STUnD: a Search Tool for Universal Dependencies. I E. Volodina, G. Bouma, D. Dannélls & D. Kokkinakis (Red.), Huminfra Handbook. Göteborgs universitet.
Tóth, Márton András. 2020. The present perfect in Swedish, Japanese and Hungarian. Osaka: Osaka university. (MA thesis).