A Semantic and Pragmatic Account of the -te-ar Construction in Japanese

Abstract

This study examines the conditions governing the distribution of the nominative-marked argument and the verb in the resultative -te-ar construction (e.g. E ga kake-te-ar-u ‘A picture has been hung (there)’). Much attention has been paid to agency and its associated character to elucidate the nature of this construction (e.g. Matsumoto 1990). The current analysis argues for a need to consider both semantic and pragmatic conditions. On the basis of Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), this study offers a lexical decompositional analysis of the verbs that can enter into the -te-ar construction. It argues that the construction requires the verb to possess an activity and a change-of-state component in its logical structure (LS), corroborating and expanding on Hasegawa (1996). The notion of coercion is drawn upon to explain why a verb that lacks the change-of-state component in its LS can be combined with -te-ar in some contexts. Further, the notion of objectivity (Kuno 1972) is drawn upon to account for infelicities arising when the sentence functions as presentational.