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Deverbal psych nominals and nominative-accusative object case alternation in Japanese: an experimental study

  • Shin Fukuda EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 9, 2023
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Abstract

Japanese psychological nouns (psych nouns) suki ‘like’ and kirai ‘dislike’ mark their objects with nominative or accusative case, but it is unclear what circumstances make accusative objects acceptable. Two acceptability judgment experiments manipulating object case, object animacy, and the psych nouns’ syntactic environment (copular, inchoative, relative clause) show significantly lower acceptability of accusative than nominative objects in copular and relative clauses, but no significant difference in inchoative clauses. A proposed account for these findings is that psych nouns can be nominalized VoicePs, in which case their projections contain external and event arguments and their objects are accusative-licensed, or nominalized VPs, in which case no external or event argument is available, and their objects are caseless and marked with nominative as the default case. The experiments also reveal a significant interaction between object animacy and case with suki ‘like’, suggesting the possibility that this is an emerging differential object-marking. (148)


Corresponding author: Shin Fukuda, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 1890 East-West Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

Parts of this study were presented at the 12th Ochanomizu University Japanese Studies Consortium, the 26th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK26) at UCLA, and the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 38) at University of British Columbia. I would like to thank the audiences at these events for their helpful feedback and comments. I would also like to thank Kamil Ud Deen, Li “Julie” Jiang, Akari Ohba, Yoko Sugioka, and Yukinori Takubo for their helpful comments and suggestions for earlier versions of this study, and three anonymous reviewers for Journal of Japanese Linguistics and Editor-in-Chief Masahiko Minami for their feedback and comments that improved various aspects of this study. Finally, I would like to thank Yuki Hirose and Hajime Ono for their generous help in recruiting participants. All remaining errors are my own.

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Received: 2021-02-21
Accepted: 2022-07-21
Published Online: 2023-11-09
Published in Print: 2023-11-27

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