On the interaction between tense harmony and factivity in (dialects of) Japanese


First of all, I'm a linguist asking a VERY technical question, so I'll do my
best to make myself understood. I'd prefer if **commenters made it clear what
their level of Japanese is (native, advanced, etc.).**

* * *

English and Japanese are said to differ in that the former has tense harmony,
whereas the latter doesn't. Having tense harmony means that if a main verb and
its subordinate are both in the past tense, then the whole clause **must** be
interpreted as referring to two **simultaneous** past events. For instance,
(1) means that at some time _t_ in the past Taro said that Hanako was in
Seattle at _t_ (while he was in Tokyo speaking).

[code]

    (1) Taro said that Hanako was in Seattle.
    
[/code]

Japanese works differently. The literal, word-by-word translation of (1) into
Japanese means that at some time _t_ in the past Taro said that Hanako was in
Seattle at _t'_ , for some time _t'_ < _t_ (in particular, Hanako could've
already left Seattle when Taro made his statement):

[code]

    (2) 太郎は、花子がシアトルにいたと言った (back-shifted interpretation)
    
[/code]

In order to get a proper translation of (1) you need a **present tense verb**
in the subordinate clause:

[code]

    (3) 太郎は、花子がシアトルにいると言った (simultaneous interpretation)
    
[/code]

This shows that Japanese doesn't have tense harmony: when the main verb and
its subordinate are both in the past, you don't get "harmony" or
"simultaneity"; you get a back-shifted interpretation in which the event
referred to by the subordinate verb is a past event relative to the event
referred to by the main verb.

**However, it is claimed that for some Japanese speakers the "simultaneous
reading" is admissible when the main verb is a factive verb** [What is a
factive verb? A factive verb presupposes that its subordinate clause is true:
_know_ is factive because "she knows that it's raining" presupposes that it's
actually raining; on the other hand, _believe_ is not factive because "she
believes that it's raining" doesn't presuppose that it's raining... she could
be dead wrong!].

[code]

    (4) 太郎は自分が癌だったと知っていた
    
[/code]

Does this accord with your intuition? Do you interpret (4) to mean that Taro
knew at _t_ that he had cancer at _t_ , or do you get a back-shifted reading?
Are there any more examples like this one? (I know very little of Japanese,
but I'm told other factive verbs are 後悔する, 忘れる, etc.).




(Disclaimer: I am a native Japanese speaker, but not an expert of language)

  * (a) 太郎は自分が癌だと知っていた
  * (b) 太郎は自分が癌だったと知っていた

I feel there is a slight difference in meaning between (a) and (b).

Sentence (a) is the natural choice in most cases because of the [relative-
tense](/questions/tagged/relative-tense "show questions tagged 'relative-
tense'") rule you have described. But (b) may be used to describe certain
situations:

  1. Other people around Taro had known about his disease (at _t'_ ) before Taro himself learned the fact (at _t_ ). That is, the speaker is somehow emphasizing 'Taro has a cancer' was already past ( _t'_ ) news to many when Taro finally recognized it ( _t_ ).
  2. Taro was recalling a certain past event (symptom) that had made himself worry about his disease. For example, if you experienced bloody stool last month and a physician told you today "You have a colon cancer", then you may say 僕は癌だっ **た** のか! ("So, I have/had a cancer(, that explains a lot)!") Japanese often uses た/だ to describe something in the present/future for various reasons (See [discovery/recall-た](https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/another-function-of-the-ta-form-discovery-and-recall/) and [this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/40888/5010)). You cannot say this if you were asymptomatic.

Either way, I would say 癌だった in (b) is somehow related to something in the
relative past ( _t'_ ), so some sort of back-shifting is involved. But saying
癌だった does not mean he has recovered from cancer at the point of _t_.

(To be honest, I'm not sure how a "factive verb" comes into play; this is
probably the first time I heard such a verb category regarding the Japanese
language, and no other questions here contain such a phrase. Do you have an
article for that?)

