A study of shinai as a usage of Imperfect in comparison to shiteinai

In Japanese, to express the imperfective aspect, shiteinai is mainly used; besides, shinai is also used in the limited context. Previous studies considered shinai as a usage of imperfect from the viewpoints of context and lexical feature. However, it is difficult to say that these studies have revealed the condition to realize the imperfective usage of shinai. In this paper, we discuss the condition to realize the imperfective usage of shinai . As a result, we concluded that shinai could express the imperfect in the context where “the speaker is concerned with whether the event has been realized”. In addition, we revealed that the lexical feature affects the aspect of the event that the speaker can grasp