「テオク」の意味考察 -アスペクト性をめぐって-

Abstract

The Japanese subsidiary verb teoku is said to bepolysemous, and the literature has had no shared precise opinions on it. The aim of this paper is to set up a framework to comprehensively capture the meanings of teoku. Our claim is that teoku has both the usages of a subjective feature, which indicates the perfective aspect, and the usages of the objective feature, which means the continuous aspect. Here we put forward the novel term sochi (=a measure (措置)), which includes the meaning of transactions both with and without some actions. As a result, we indicate that the relevance of usages is mutual between “continuing change of state of objects” and “transaction.” Moreover, the relevance between “maintenance of the present status” and “forbearance” is also mutual. We also define the meaning of teoku as “taking some measures foreseeing the future.” This implies the change of state and continuation of the effect. As a whole, we can safely conclude that teoku has the character as a prospective form and is used to describe some actions related to the future. This amounts to denying the previous analyses that all the usages of “continuing change of state of objects,” “transaction,” “maintenance of the present status,” and “forbearance” are independently composed. Furthermore, we can add to this point the usage of teoku, which in the previous works has been accounted for in term of perfective.What is more, the function of “continuation of effects,” namely, “continuation” can be included. The end result of the subjects, and the maintenance of their present status should be added.By integrating them altogether, we can present the complete picture of the functions of teoku.