On the past tense in Japanese relative clauses

This research investigates the past tense marker -ta in Japanese relative clauses with two empirical goals in its focus: (1) to examine and explain how the past marker -ta is construed, (2) to investigate conditions that determine tense construal of the past marker -ta. Two environments are considered: (1) the past in relative clauses under main clauses with past verbs, and (2) the past in relative clauses under main clauses with non-past verbs. I claim that the past -ta has two points of orientation for its interpretation: the moment of utterance and main clause events. The two options are realized as the feature [+/-Deictic] on the head of Tense Phrases. The selection of features itself is not constrained by the theory of tense. However, I argue that the orientation of tense is determined based on at least two factors: licensing of Deictic temporal adverbs and the definiteness of relative clause head nouns. Therefore, the main goal from a theoretical perspective is to construct a theory whose coverage includes these two factors and explain how they interact with tense. The proposed analysis addresses some problematic aspects of the previous analyses, which either do not have enough empirical coverage to account for the Japanese cases or adopt some theoretical machinery (e.g. movement of relative clauses) in order to obtain desired readings without explaining how ambiguity with respect to temporal location of events in relative and main clauses is resolved. In addition, I extend the analysis to two other kinds of temporal adverbs (Clock-Calendar, e.g. Sunday and Dependent, e.g. the following day) and show that temporal interpretation of all three types of temporal adverbs are syntactically explained in a similar way with the feature [+/-Deictic]. Then, I discuss how definiteness determines the choice of orientation. Indefinite head nouns only allow tenses in relative clauses to be interpreted in relation to main clauses tenses. Definite head nouns do not have such a restriction, that is, they are interpreted independently of main clause tenses. I further explore the phenomenon and explain why definiteness is related to the temporal interpretation of relative clauses.