Tense, Aspect, and Argument Structure

This paper is concerned with an intriguing difference between Japanese and English involving the progressive form be V-ing and the -te iru form as well as the passive constructions in the two languages. Some of the complex semantic properties of the -te iru construction in Japanese are discussed in Ogihara (1998), where I present a proposal to account for the multiple interpretations associated with this construction. This paper is a follow-up to this paper and attempts to present an improved proposal. In order to help the reader to understand my position, I shall start with a short description of the various interpretations associated with -te iru by comparing its behavior with that of the be V-ing form in English. Vendler (1957) establishes four aspectual classes of verbs and characterizes them as in (1).