Temporal connectives and differential arguments in Japanese

Abstract

This paper examines the Japanese temporal connective mae ‘before’ with a focus on scale structure. It has been argued that temporal precedence expressed by a temporal connective can be defined in terms of a dense scale (e.g., Klein, 2009; von Stechow, 2009; Sharvit, 2014; a.o.). This study, however, points out that mae exhibits some peculiarities not expected by an analysis using a dense scale, and offers an alternative analysis of mae based on Alstott’s (2023, 2025) analysis of ordinals. Specifically, I propose that mae can occur in two distinct types of syntactic structures: a nominal structure and an adjectival comparative structure. In each structure, mae bears a different semantic function, and its interpretation varies according to the nature of an appropriate scale.