Time Focus within the Japanese Tense System.

It has been generally understood that Japanese has two grammatical tenses, past and non-past. However, there are statements about future events which use the "past tense." Furthermore, for certain verbs, the "past tense" is not confined to describing strictly a past event. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of tense in Japanese and to show the relationship between grammatical tense in a sentence and the extra-linguistic time of events by introducing the notion of focus. Tense is examined in main and dependent clauses. (Author)