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Floating quantifiers in Japanese passives and beyond

  • Yoshihisa Kitagawa EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 25, 2018
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Journal of Japanese Linguistics
From the journal Journal of Japanese Linguistics Volume 34 Issue 2

Abstract

This work attempts to defend the so-called Uniform Hypothesis for passives in Japanese by re-examining the empirical phenomena involving quantifier float (Q-float). We will attempt to reinforce the following main tenets of the Uniform Hypothesis — (i) that all ni-passive sentences in Japanese involve complementation and the theta-marking of their subjects, and (ii) that they crucially lack NP movement. We will also closely examine the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and prosodic properties of Q-float in general.

Keywords: floating quantifier (FQ); quantifier float (Q-float); direct passive; indirect passive; the uniform hypothesis of Japanese passives; strong determiners; strong classifiers

Acknowledgements

This article consists of slightly revised sections of the paper entitled “Passive in Japanese,” which the late S-Y. Kuroda and I wrote in 1991 and kept revising thereafter. While various versions of this paper were distributed among fellow researchers, its ever-expanding content and scale made it difficult for us to find a relevant place to have it published. I have decided to make an attempt to have this article published in the current volume for two reasons. First, the discussion I put together in this article has often been taken up and developed in the literature and it seems worthwhile to make it more publicly available. Second, it will provide me with an opportunity to bid farewell to not only Inoue-sensei but also Kuroda-sensei, the two giants in Japanese linguistics, who have played an important role in shaping my attitude toward life as a linguist. I should also confess that having at least a portion of our paper published will lessen the guilty I have had for a long time about the failure to accomplish its publication before Prof. Kuroda’s untimely and too early departure. Although a technicality forces me to call the present work single-authored, it in fact is a co-authored work. The only exception is the few ideas on prosody and semantics of floating quantifiers I have added anew in Sections 3.3 and 3.4. We are grateful to Greg Carlson, Tom Grano, Hajime Hoji, Peter Lasersohn, Dave Lebeaux, David Pesetsky, Peter Sells and Tim Stowell, among others, and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, discussions and/or judgments. The usual disclaimers apply especially to whatever mistakes and deficiencies originated from my ignorance and immaturity.

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Published Online: 2018-10-25
Published in Print: 2018-10-25

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Editorial
  4. Guest Editors’ Notes
  5. Obituary: Dr Kazuko Inoue (1919–2017)
  6. Articles
  7. On so-called “gapless” constructions in Japanese
  8. Tonal alignment and preaccentuation
  9. Two puzzles on the nominative particle ga in Japanese
  10. Floating quantifiers in Japanese passives and beyond
  11. Strong and weak pronouns in the covert system of pronouns
  12. On some constraints on right dislocation in Japanese
https://doi.org/10.1515/jjl-2018-0016
Keywords for this article
floating quantifier (FQ); quantifier float (Q-float); direct passive; indirect passive; the uniform hypothesis of Japanese passives; strong determiners; strong classifiers

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Editorial
  4. Guest Editors’ Notes
  5. Obituary: Dr Kazuko Inoue (1919–2017)
  6. Articles
  7. On so-called “gapless” constructions in Japanese
  8. Tonal alignment and preaccentuation
  9. Two puzzles on the nominative particle ga in Japanese
  10. Floating quantifiers in Japanese passives and beyond
  11. Strong and weak pronouns in the covert system of pronouns
  12. On some constraints on right dislocation in Japanese
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