Volume 22, Issue 1

Imperatives are sometimes interpreted as conditionals. Such conditional imperatives can be observed in both English and Japanese. The imperative form may induce the conditional meaning in English, but the discussion of the imperative form of a verb does not provide us with a full understanding of Japanese conditional imperatives. The present paper argues that the imperative form of the string V-te-miru induces the conditional interpretation. It is also argued that the imperative form of a single verb or the V1-te-V2 construction itself plays no crucial role in the inducement of that meaning. The V-te-miro conditional imperative (i.e. the imperative form of V-te-miru with the conditional interpretation) displays different behavior from other regular imperative forms. It co-occurs with negative polarity items, self-uncontrollable predicates, and the subject other than the second person, etc., whereas other imperative forms do not. The idea that a particular verbal form of V-te-miru (e.g. the imperative) induces a specific interpretation (e.g. the conditional) implies that different forms of V-te-miru give rise to different meanings. In fact, the hypothetical form of V-te-miru develops the meaning of viewpoint, while the reanalyzed imperative form of V-te-miru induces the exclamatory interpretation. These findings afford a profound insight into the constructional view in grammaticalization theory.

This paper aims to provide a case study of the realization of sokuon /Q/ in words borrowed from Korean into Japanese, a topic which has not been discussed at length in the literature. The Japanese adaptation of foreign words has been widely discussed, but most studies focus on words from English. Looking at Korean-based words in Japanese, however, we encounter certain adaptation patterns that are not necessarily the same as those found for English loanwords. This paper focuses on /Q/ realization in the Japanese adaptation of Korean words from a phonetic perspective, and argues that low-level phonetic information plays an important role in adaptation of Korean words. In addition, comparing these findings with findings on English loanwords in previous studies, it is argued that the difference regarding /Q/ realization between words from Korean and words from English is also attributable to actual phonetic differences between the two source languages.

This study examines native Japanese speakers’ speech errors of the case particles, the dative ni and the accusative o, occurring in object NPs of two-place predicates. The speech error data demonstrate that the semantic basis of ni and o errors in native Japanese speakers’ utterances is closely related to transitivity (as discussed by Hopper and Thompson 1980). Japanese speakers tend to use the accusative o for the object NPs (even when the dative ni is required by the verb) if the meanings of the events and actions that the speakers wish to talk about are relatively high in transitivity and ni if the events are relatively low in transitivity and if they involve some kind of directionality. The findings suggest that Japanese speakers utilize dynamic online semantic mapping when selecting case particles in speech and that such mapping may facilitate online sentence production when the verb selection (the retrieval of the target verb) is not finalized.