Abstract
Japanese psychological nouns (psych nouns) suki ‘like’ and kirai ‘dislike’ mark their objects with nominative or accusative case, but it is unclear what circumstances make accusative objects acceptable. Two acceptability judgment experiments manipulating object case, object animacy, and the psych nouns’ syntactic environment (copular, inchoative, relative clause) show significantly lower acceptability of accusative than nominative objects in copular and relative clauses, but no significant difference in inchoative clauses. A proposed account for these findings is that psych nouns can be nominalized VoicePs, in which case their projections contain external and event arguments and their objects are accusative-licensed, or nominalized VPs, in which case no external or event argument is available, and their objects are caseless and marked with nominative as the default case. The experiments also reveal a significant interaction between object animacy and case with suki ‘like’, suggesting the possibility that this is an emerging differential object-marking. (148)
Acknowledgments
Parts of this study were presented at the 12th Ochanomizu University Japanese Studies Consortium, the 26th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK26) at UCLA, and the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 38) at University of British Columbia. I would like to thank the audiences at these events for their helpful feedback and comments. I would also like to thank Kamil Ud Deen, Li “Julie” Jiang, Akari Ohba, Yoko Sugioka, and Yukinori Takubo for their helpful comments and suggestions for earlier versions of this study, and three anonymous reviewers for Journal of Japanese Linguistics and Editor-in-Chief Masahiko Minami for their feedback and comments that improved various aspects of this study. Finally, I would like to thank Yuki Hirose and Hajime Ono for their generous help in recruiting participants. All remaining errors are my own.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Deverbal psych nominals and nominative-accusative object case alternation in Japanese: an experimental study
- A misleading syllable-based generalization about Japanese SJ+/zu/ compounds
- “Pseudo-dialect” or “role language”? Speech varieties in three Japanese translations of Gone with the Wind
- Pragmatic functions of wara in Japanese text messages
- Book Reviews
- Timothy J. Vance: Irregular Phonological Marking of Japanese Compounds: Benjamin Smith Lyman’s Pioneering Research on Rendaku
- Hideki Kishimoto: Analyzing Japanese Syntax: A Generative Perspective
- Yoshio Ueno: Gendainihongo no Bunpōkōzō: Keitaironhen [The Grammatical Structure of Modern Japanese: Morphology]
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Deverbal psych nominals and nominative-accusative object case alternation in Japanese: an experimental study
- A misleading syllable-based generalization about Japanese SJ+/zu/ compounds
- “Pseudo-dialect” or “role language”? Speech varieties in three Japanese translations of Gone with the Wind
- Pragmatic functions of wara in Japanese text messages
- Book Reviews
- Timothy J. Vance: Irregular Phonological Marking of Japanese Compounds: Benjamin Smith Lyman’s Pioneering Research on Rendaku
- Hideki Kishimoto: Analyzing Japanese Syntax: A Generative Perspective
- Yoshio Ueno: Gendainihongo no Bunpōkōzō: Keitaironhen [The Grammatical Structure of Modern Japanese: Morphology]