Volume 27, Issue 1

This paper deals with the physical attribute construction (PAC) in Japanese such as Cameron Diaz-wa kireina me-o siteiru ‘Cameron Diaz has beautiful eyes’. This paper points out that the PAC shares some properties with the cognate object construction (COC) in English such as The tree grew a century's growth within only ten years. The properties include: (i) the obligatory presence of the modifier, (ii) the semantic focus on the modifier, (iii) the inability to be passivized and (iv) the inability to be operator-moved. Based upon these properties, this paper reaches the conclusion that the English COC involving unaccusative verbs is the counterpart of the Japanese PAC. Furthermore some principled accounts are given to those properties.

Numerous studies have been done in various theoretical frameworks on the Japanese adverb yahari, but very few considered its morphophonologcal variants, yappari, and yappa as objects of serious investigation both synchronically and diachronically. Through the analyses of corpora, this study delineates semantic and functional changes of these variants. Yahari was first attested as a clause-internal manner adverb, meaning ‘being still’, then developed a sentential modal adverbial usage, ‘as expected, after all, at any rate’. Yappari was also a manner adverbial first, and through a sentential modal, it also developed discourse particle functions. Yappa was attested much later for more subjective and pragmatic functions. The developmental order of these three as yahari > yappari > yappa has bearing on issues in grammaticalization. First, the paper argues that the yahari case lends support to Traugott’s (1995) proposal that the adverbial cline, “Clause-internal Adverbial > Sentence Adverbial > Discourse Particle” should be added to the inventory of grammaticalization because of its similar developmental path. Second, this study also shows that the yahari case is an instantiation of intersubjectification (Traugott 2003). Third, it demonstrates that the yahari case counters the generally held parameter of “syntactic scope decrease” (Givon 1971, Lehmann 1995 [1982]), and instead exhibits “syntactic scope increase”.

Using natural data and a set of clearly defined criteria to select 808 target examples, this study investigates several claims made by researchers concerning number interpretation in Japanese, including the claim that for noun phrases unmarked for number, if a number construal is possible in their interpretation, then in the majority of cases number is clearly determinable as either singular or plural (Jarkey and Moore 2001); that context plays a crucial role in determining number (Umegaki 1961, Tamamura 1986, Jarkey and Moore 2001, and Mizuguchi 2004) and hence there is little need for regular explicit number marking (Okutsu 1986, Tamamura 1986); and that nouns unmarked for number tend to be interpreted as referring to a single entity (Okutsu 1986 and Moore 2004). Among other things discussed, this study confirms the marginal proportion of readings having indeterminacy of number and the high proportion of singular readings of nouns unmarked for number. The study, however, suggests evaluating with caution the claim that number interpretation relies heavily on context, pointing out that the validity of such a claim depends on how ‘context’ is defined. Tamamura’s claim that explicit marking for plurality is rarely required in Japanese is also challenged on the basis of statistical data.

Loanwords in Japanese undergo a variety of truncation processes, including mora-clipping. Mora-clipping can itself be subdivided into back- (e.g. čokoreeto > čoko ‘chocolate’), fore- (wanisu > nisu ‘varnish’) and mid-clipping (moruhine > mohi ‘morphine’). Although back-clipping is the unmarked process, this paper seeks to answer a major issue as yet unresolved in the literature: at which mora are back-, fore- and mid-clippings typically clipped, and why? Although previous studies have claimed that syllable structure plays a major role, many exceptions remain unexplained.

This paper presents a study of native speaker intuitions regarding the choice of conditional markers in Japanese in regard to Modal Constraint Approach, whose central claim is that the choice of the four conditional markers to, tara, ba and nara is governed by the modal contents of the consequent clause. This study reports the outcome of a computer-based experimental study on conditionals, where the validity of the current view of modal constraints is being tested against the judgment of native Japanese speakers from the Kanto district. Our analysis indicates the current view is in accord with native speakers’ intuition in the case of tara and to, but it definitely needs to be revised in the case of ba. Specifically, against the predictions of the Modal Constraint Approach we found that even expressions of command, request and prohibition were regarded as fairly acceptable in a number of cases, suggesting that native intuition is influenced by a series of factors that come into play with different level of influence on each speaker.

This paper presents some new data of the Japanese language, which shows that the nominative NP, particularly the nominative subject, can stay in-situ and that in a certain case, it cannot move to the Spec of TP. These examples come from a certain type of idioms with ditransitive verbs given by Miyagawa and Tsujioka (2004). Based on their observation that some idioms cannot allow displacement of their parts, we will see that in such idioms, passivization is possible only if the nominative NP (the subject) remains in-situ. This supports the analysis that the nominative subject does not have to move to the Spec of TP to satisfy a feature of T, for example, the EPP (Fukui 1986, Kuroda 1988, among others). This paper makes a stronger claim: At least in overt syntax, the nominative subject in our examples may not move to the Spec of TP. We will further observe that the same is true of the genitive NP of so-called ga-no (nominative-genitive) conversion. The examples with the idiom support the analysis which claims that the genitive NP in ga-no conversion stays in VP in overt syntax (Watanabe 1994, 1996; Miyagawa 1997, 2011).