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In this paper I develop a unified analysis of the Japanese passive, which provides a uniform syntactic/semantic representation of the alleged varieties of passives (direct, indirect, possessive) as a complex predicate that encodes the triadic relation of "lack of control" among an agent, undergoer and event. Various differences among the direct, possessive, and indirect passives (the adversative effect implicature, the possibility of reflexive binding, the animacy constraint on the subject, etc.) are explained as cooperative effects of the core syntactic/sematic properties of the passive morpheme -(r)are and functional/pragmatic factors like conversational implicature and empathy constraints.
This paper proposes a constraint-based, comprehensive analysis of the Internally-Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) in Japanese which is able to accommodate the synchronic properties as well as the diachronic change that IHRC went through. This paper claims that IHRC should be defined as a special type of non-head daughter of the main predicate. The predicate is subcategorized for a clause, while it calls for an entity-like argument. The multi-level architecture of HPSG accommodates the apparent syntax-semantic mismatch. The IHRC is syntactically a clausal complement, while it is not semantically selected by the main predicate. The main predicate, on the other hand, selects an entity as its argument, but the entity is not syntactically given. I claim that the syntax of IHRC specifies this much. The rest, or the actual linkage between the predicate and the semantically required target entity is semantically or pragmatically achieved. Drawing on the ideas of Argument Realization and Argument Extension with the postulation of the interface level DEPENDENTS proposed in Bouma et al. (2001), I have demonstrated how the present proposal can connect the clausal complement, IHRC, and adverbial clauses, thus providing the structural aspect of the motivation for the diachronic change.
In this paper, I argue (i) that Japanese has constructions that are almost the exact mirror images of the right-node raising constructions in English, and (ii) that the properties of those constructions, which I refer to as left-node raising constructions, can be captured straightforwardly if and only if the CONTENT values of domain objects, not those of signs, are assumed to be the principal locus of meaning assembly. In the theory proposed, it is claimed that semantic composition (including "quantifier retrieval") takes place not when some signs are syntactically combined to produce a new, larger sign but when some domain objects (which are essentially prosodic constituents) are merged (by the total or partial compaction operation) to produce a new domain object (i.e. a new, larger prosodic constituent).
In Japanese, direct combination of verbs or adjectives by coordination (with to 'and') or juxtaposition (with its empty counterpart) can form a NP, if the conjuncts are antonymous to each other; the coordinator to 'and' can combine only NPs elsewhere. We claim that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer that can nominalize each conjunct, and that the new nominal construction has been gradually developing in the history of Japanese. An acceptability-rating experiment targeting 400 participants shows that the younger speakers were likely to judge this construction more acceptable than the older ones, that this tendency is slightly weaker in the Nominative condition than in the Genitive condition, and that the coordination condition was significantly worse than the juxtaposition condition.
This paper corroborates the interpretability proposal of Chomsky (1995) with evidence from scrambling in Japanese and German. First it is shown that scrambling in Japanese is semantically vacuous, whereas scrambling in German is semantically contentful. Chomsky’s proposal then predicts that the feature driving Japanese scrambling is erased after checking, while the corresponding feature in German remains visible, specifically for the Shortest Attract condition. Looking at patterns of movement that result in overlapping paths, this prediction is seen to be correct.
It is one of the most highly debated issues in loanword phonology whether loanword adaptations are phonologically or phonetically driven. This paper addresses this issue and aims at demonstrating that only the acceptance of both a phonological as well as a phonetic approximation stance can adequately account for the data found in Japanese. This point will be exemplified with the adaptation of German and French mid front rounded vowels in Japanese. It will be argued that the adaptation of German /oe/ and /ø/ as Japanese /e/ is phonologically grounded, whereas the adaptation of French /oe/ and /ø/ as Japanese /u/ is phonetically grounded. This asymmetry in the adaptation process of German and French mid front rounded vowels and further examples of loans in Japanese lead to the only conclusion that both strategies of loanword adaptation occur in languages. It will be shown that not only perception, but also the influence of orthography, of conventions and the knowledge of the source language play a role in the adaptation process.
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
Als eine der grundlegenden Systematisierungen im Bereich der Kausativität und damit – aus der Sicht des Kölner Universalienprojekts – der Technik KAUSATIVIERUNG – hat sich meines Erachtens die von Comrie (1981:165ff) eingeführte – und von H. Seiler wiederaufgenommene (1984:67) – und als Kontinuum angeordnete, Dreiteilung in analytische (= periphrastische), morphologische und lexikalische Bildungen erwiesen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden Aufsatzes steht der Versuch, im Tagalog, der wichtigsten philippinischen Sprache, diese drei Erscheinungsformen der Kausativierung zu untersuchen und systematisch aufeinander zu beziehen. Dabei ist von besonderer Relevanz, daß in diesem Zusammenhang der semanto-syntaktischen Eigenheit des Tagalog als Vertreter des aktiscischen Sprachbaus wesentliche Bedeutung zukommt. Weiterhin ist zu berücksichtigen, daß aus der Sich der Gesamtdimension PARTIZIPATION Phänomene aus anderen Techniken (z .B. aus der TRANSITIVIERUNG) nicht unerwähnt bleiben dürfen. Auf diese Weise führt die vorliegende Arbeit letztlich dazu, Zusammenhänge zwischen TRANSITIVIERUNG und KAUSATIVIERUNG in Form von kontinuierlichen Übergängen aufzuzeigen.