Thetic judgment as presentational
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Nobuko Hasegawa
Abstract
Kuroda (1965, 1972, 1992) pointed out the distinction between topicalized and nontopicalized sentences in terms of judgment styles, discussing what semantico/cognitive functions they express. His work has set the foundations for generative studies of Japanese; however, the differences in judgment styles have not been well-represented in syntactic structure. In particular, thetic judgment sentences seem to have been mis-treated, which have often been mixed up with neutral description sentences in the sense of Kuno (1973). In this paper, I argue that thetic judgment sentences constitute an independent syntactic representation that shares the characteristics of presentationals such as Locative Inversion in English. The apparent differences between thetic judgments in Japanese and presentationals in English are attributed to the differences in these languages with respect to how sentence types are syntactically represented; either at the right periphery (i.e., at Head of the C system) or at the left periphery (i.e., at Spec of the C system).
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Journal of Japanese Linguistics Vol. 26 (2010). Contents
- Yuki Kuroda, a personal recollection
- Thetic judgment as presentational
- Hypothesis testing in generative grammar: Evaluation of predicted schematic asymmetries
- On the ga-marked subject: Its syntactic and semantic characteristics
- Revisiting the two double-nominative constructions in Japanese
- On the nature of the complementizer to
Articles in the same Issue
- Journal of Japanese Linguistics Vol. 26 (2010). Contents
- Yuki Kuroda, a personal recollection
- Thetic judgment as presentational
- Hypothesis testing in generative grammar: Evaluation of predicted schematic asymmetries
- On the ga-marked subject: Its syntactic and semantic characteristics
- Revisiting the two double-nominative constructions in Japanese
- On the nature of the complementizer to
