Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect
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Satoshi Tomioka
Abstract
The exhaustivity of an embedded interrogative sentence can be altered by the presence of an adverb in the matrix clause. This phenomenon, known as Quantificational Variability Effect (QVE), manifests itself in a peculiar way in Japanese. A QVE-inducing adverb can take the form of a numeral classifier that agrees with the embedded Wh-phrase. While a QVE-inducing numeral classifier appears to be associated with an embedded wh-phrase, it is not clear how such an association can be established. I argue that Japanese embedded questions are implicitly nominalized in the fashion similar to the internally-headed relative clause construction, and that the nominalized embedded questions are treated as concealed questions. The proposed analysis gives a very simple account for the puzzling QVE construction, as the floated quantifier structure with a concealed-question-denoting NP is commonplace. The paper examines a variety of phenomena, such as doubly headed relative clause structure and selectional restrictions on QVE, which support the nominal structure of Japanese embedded questions.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at several occasions including Workshop in Altaic Formal Linguistics 6, Pennsylvania Linguistic Colloquium 33, and Workshop on Interrogatives at NINJAL. I would like to thank the audience at those occasions for useful comments and suggestions. I also benefited from the comments from two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for the remaining errors and shortcomings. My special thanks to the editors, who invited me to submit a paper to this special issue dedicated to the late Professor Kazuko Inoue. I came to know her relatively late in my academic career (and very late in hers), but she was truly inspirational. My only regret is that I didn’t meet her earlier.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Regular Articles
- Learnability issues in L2 Japanese: Prosody and ambiguity resolution
- A linguistically-informed way of introducing Japanese verbs to second language learners
- Special Section
- Special Section Editors’ Notes
- On the peculiar nature of double complement unaccusatives in Japanese
- Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect
- Book Reviews
- Mutsuko Endo Hudson, Yoshiko Matsumoto, and Junko Mori: Pragmatics of Japanese: Perspectives on Grammar, Interaction and Culture
- Hisashi Noda and Kumiko Sakoda: Learners’ Corpora and Japanese Language Education Research
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Regular Articles
- Learnability issues in L2 Japanese: Prosody and ambiguity resolution
- A linguistically-informed way of introducing Japanese verbs to second language learners
- Special Section
- Special Section Editors’ Notes
- On the peculiar nature of double complement unaccusatives in Japanese
- Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect
- Book Reviews
- Mutsuko Endo Hudson, Yoshiko Matsumoto, and Junko Mori: Pragmatics of Japanese: Perspectives on Grammar, Interaction and Culture
- Hisashi Noda and Kumiko Sakoda: Learners’ Corpora and Japanese Language Education Research
