The Meanings and the Uses of the English and the Japanese Present-Time Adverbs

The English adverb now and the Japanese adverb ima (ʻnowʼ) refer to utterance time in their deictic uses, indicate reference time in a narrative context, and mark a topic shift or discontinuity at the beginning of an utterance. This paper focuses on their deictic uses, where they seem to differ in their temporal coverage of meaning. The deictic use of now does not occur in past-tense sentences, but ima does. This paper analyzes their meanings in a unified way to capture both deictic and anaphoric uses of now and ima.