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Japanese is known to have verbal compounds consisting of two verbs (hereafter “V-V compounds”), and many theoretical studies have shown that V-V compounds can be divided into two types: lexical and syntactic V-V compounds (Kageyama 1993, among many others). A recent study by Kageyama (2013, 2016a, 2016b) points out that the lexical V-V compounds can be further categorized into two types, one of which can be paraphrased as the V- te V sequence. The aim of our current study is to elucidate based on experimental data whether Japanese-speaking children aged 4-5 can correctly comprehend lexical V-V compounds and differentiate them from the V- te V sequence which are superficially similar to but syntactically distinct from them. Our experiment reveals that children can differentiate between the syntactic properties of these constructions and thus have acquired the two different constructions consisting of two-verb sequences by the time they turn 4 years old.

Japanese is often said to be stronger than English in construing an event and reporting it from the subjective position. While the auxiliary verb –te kuru ‘COME’ is one of the deictic devices that reports an event from a subjective perspective, very limited attention has been given to the use of –te kuru when it denotes ‘psychological deixis’ (Sawada 2000). Using on-line postings of sexual harassment victims, this study examines how the psychological –te kuru expresses the victims’ experience subjectively particularly in comparison with the much-studied passive structure. While showing that the two syntactic structures would often be interchangeable in the data, the study reveals that when the victim feels powerless and subdued by the offender’s act upon her/him, only the passive is used, while if the victim has a sufficient sense of power to feel anger, –te kuru tends to be used. The study argues that the semantic traits of the passive [associated with the perfective aspect] and –te kuru [which is interpreted as ‘psychological inchoative’ in this study] are reflected in the choices made in the victims’ narratives.

This paper investigates the Japanese pronoun hon-nin , which has so far been paid little attention to, and proposes the binding condition to the effect that hon-nin must not be bound by the subject NP. We further show that the Japanese reflexive zibun and the Japanese pronoun hon-nin show complementary distribution just as the English reflexive ( himself , etc.) and the English pronoun ( him , etc.) do so.

In Japanese, the verbal negative marker nai appears in both negated verbs (as a sentential negator) and compound negative adjectives (as an affix). Negative nai used as a sentential negator is a syntactically independent word devoid of adjectival properties despite its adjectival inflection, whereas negative nai appearing in negative adjectives is a derivational affix. On the basis of idiomatic expressions, the present article argues that the lexical word nai ‘null, empty’ has developed into the affix nai while retaining its lexical properties via morphologization. On the other hand, the functional negator nai is argued to have emerged from the same lexical word nai via decategorialization, which induces a shift from a lexical to a functional category. The analysis taking the two uses of nai to trace back to the common source of the lexical negative adjective word nai provides a natural account for why nai has these two totally different uses.

Japanese has contrasts between onsets romanized as singletons and Cy clusters (e.g., kaku ‘rank’ vs. kyaku ‘guest’). It is uncertain whether Cy should be treated as a distinctively palatalized consonant /C y / or as a /Cy/ cluster; the phonetic realization is compatible with either. A distributional argument favoring the /Cy/ analysis is the neutralization of the contrast before front vowels: Ci, Ce, *Cyi, *Cye ; the absence of */Cyi/ and */Cye/ follows automatically from */yi/ and */ye/. In this paper, high vowel devoicing is used as a diagnostic to investigate this phonemicization issue. A production experiment was conducted, comparing the rates of vowel devoicing in words containing Cu/iC and CyuC sequences (e.g., ma put a vs. ma pyut a ). The devoicing rate was significantly lower in Cy u C than in C u/i C . This supports the cluster analysis /Cy/ (with the /y/ inhibiting devoicing) over the singleton analysis /C y / for the onset palatalized consonants of Japanese.

This study examines phonetic cues used to express politeness in spoken Japanese. The tasks of producing polite and non-polite speech in two different types of sentences (a question and a polite imperative) and in attitudinal speech (a request and a decline) were used to examine various F0 and temporal aspects of polite speech. Eight sentences spoken by 18 native speakers were acoustically measured at both sentence level and sentence final mora level. It was found that Japanese native speakers generally use a slower speech rate and a breathy voice for polite speech, but not necessarily a high pitched voice or wider pitch range, even in the case of female speakers. The use of pitch was found to be attitude dependent, but was not affected by the sentence type. Clear gender differences were seen in various phonetic aspects. Some politeness strategies observed at individual level are also reported.