This book reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese. Watanabe takes a fundamentally different approach from previous analyses by examining the syntactic distribution of temporal suffixes in Manyōshū, an eighth-century poetry collection.

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Tense and Aspect
• 2. –(ye)ri, –kyeri, and –ki
• 3. –tu and –nu
• 4. –tari and other emerging markers
• 5. Beyond the Man’yōshū
• References
• Index
• About the Author