Volume 28, Issue 1

This paper will show that what appear to be outrageous mistakes made by native speakers as well as non-native speakers have potential to contribute in non-trivial ways to deepening our understanding of language in both theoretical and practical terms when they are analyzed properly. Specifically, it is shown that the irregular or ungrammatical constructions that are ruled out by purely structural constraints postulated in generative or other formal syntax could be systematically salvaged by differentiating two different semantic functions: property (or individual-level) predications that characterize the property or attribute of a subject NP and eventive (i.e., stage-level) predications that describe events, actions, or states that unfold with the progress of time. These two types of predications, which have been considered to be semantic or pragmatic in nature, are found to have systematic reflections in syntax.

Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist who worked for the Meiji government as a foreign expert in the 1870s. His 1894 article on rendaku later made him famous among linguists, but in 1878 he published a detailed account of Japanese pronunciation, which he claimed was motivated in part by a desire to help learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Lyman’s descriptions were quite sophisticated for the time, but it is clear in hindsight that he was hampered by the lack of a universal phonetic transcription system and by the unavailability of the phonemic principle. Lyman’s descriptions went far beyond those of his missionary contemporaries, but for ordinary learners, the kind of detail he provided would have been overkill and not much practical help.

This paper analyzes the ko-so-a demonstratives in Japanese as they occur in experimentally-obtained soliloquy data. In soliloquy, the Japanese deixis system consists of a two-way opposition, viz. ko- vs. a-. So- appears only as an anaphor; its antecedent can be either familiar or unfamiliar to the speaker, contrary to Kuno’s (1973) analysis. It is also argued that ko- and a- are always deictic in soliloquy. Adopting Chafe’s (1994) theory of consciousness, it is hypothesized that (i) a- is used when the referent is in the speaker’s peripheral consciousness, and (ii) ko- is used to refer to an entity if it is already focused at the moment of speech. Finally, it is demonstrated that so- and a- exhibit the attributive-referential distinction, which is proposed by Donnellan (1966).

The present article analyzes the use of kata ‘person’ in contemporary Japanese. The main data of the study are the speech of students talking to professors in 12 videotaped conversations. An examination of the data reveals three usages of kata, serving exalting, beautifying and ‘buffer’ functions. The exalting usage is the traditional classification of kata (sonkeigo), a type of referent honorific, while the other two are addressee honorifics. These additions reflect the general shift from referent-controlled to addressee-controlled honorification. One possible motivation for using the beautifying and ‘buffer’ types is the ease of showing politeness, instead of converting the predicate into honorific forms. It was also found that students used hito ‘person (NEUTRAL)’ and ko ‘child, kid,’ in addition to kata. The distinction suggests a possible tendency for kata to be used for out-group social superiors, hito for people in general, and ko for in-group social equals and subordinates.

The phenomenon of cross-linguistic variation in the linguistic encoding of accidental events has attracted attention of linguists (Alfonso 1971; DeLancey 1985; Hinds 1986, among others) as well as psychologists (Fausey, Long, Inamori & Boroditsky 2010; Fausey & Boroditsky 2011). Accidental events rank lower than intentional events on the continuum of transitivity proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Pardeshi (2002), and Pardeshi and Horie (2005) demonstrate that in Marathi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in India) accidental events are typically encoded using intransitive verbs in sharp contrast to Japanese. They claim that Japanese is far more liberal than Marathi in terms of permitting transitive encoding of accidental events. For Japanese, Teramura (1982), Ikegami (1982), and Nishimura (1997), among others have also pointed out that Japanese allows transitive encoding of accidental events. With a view to empirically test whether Japanese and Marathi indeed differ in terms of describing an accidental event as claimed by the previous studies, we conducted a pilot study using a non-linguistic stimulus (a video clip depicting an accidental and intentional event) and elicited linguistic responses. The results of our pilot study support the claims made in previous studies that: (i) Japanese allows transitive rendering of accidental events and (ii) transitive encoding of accidental events in Marathi is more restricted than in Japanese.

Second language learners encounter difficulty in interpreting the anaphoric relationship between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent because they often fail to reset their parameter appropriately. However, the recent interface theory has called this parameter conversion approach into question, in particular, whether L2 learners do indeed reset their language parameter during the course of L2 acquisition. This paper explores this issue by conducting an experiment with a truth-value judgment task on the interpretations of zibun among English and Chinese speaking adult learners of Japanese. The results support our hypothesis that the short-distance interpretation of zibun can be acquired early if “locality” is the core notion of human cognition, as assumed in Universal Grammar, whereas long distance interpretation takes time to acquire because of the syntax-pragmatics interface. We emphasize that the parameter resetting approach cannot provide a plausible account for this “short vs. long” asymmetry in the acquisition of zibun binding.

This paper investigates L2 learners’ interpretations of Japanese overt and empty pronouns by utilizing a truth value judgment task. The results show evidence contrary to Kanno’s (1997, 1998) claims that JFL learners have knowledge that Japanese overt pronouns cannot have quantifier antecedents from an early stage of learning. The results of the present study show evidence that JFL learners display knowledge of the coreferential readings of Japanese pronouns from an early stage of learning. However, this does not appear to be the case for the bound variable readings. In contrast, advanced learners show knowledge that overt pronouns cannot have bound variable readings. From these results we argue that: (1) it takes time to acquire the knowledge that overt pronouns cannot refer to quantifiers and (2) the JFL learners employed an L1 transfer strategy in the interpretation of Japanese overt pronouns.