Toward a Description of TE-linkage in Japanese

Since the work of Grice (1975), it has been widely accepted that there are two types of meaning for any given utterance: what is asserted and what is implicated. One salient example of the assertion/implication distinction involves the English conjunction and. In and-linked sentences, the and-then reading emerges naturally if the first conjunct can be interpreted as perfective. The same temporal sequentiality also can arise, however, even when the two clauses are co-present paratactically without and. The semantic relation of TEMPORAL SEQUENCE, accordingly, should not be attributed to the conjunction and per se (i.e. asserted), but to such pragmatic principles as the iconicity between clause order and intended temporal order (i.e. implicated). It is commonly accepted that the first type of meaning (assertion) is strictly a property of the sentence and hence is a subject for semantics proper, while the second (implication) should be accounted for by pragmatics. The present study challenges this prevailing view of linguistic meaning by examining TE-linkage in Japanese, a translational equivalent of English and-linkage.1