Volume 38, Issue 2

Some Japanese predicates allow their object to be marked either with the accusative particle o , the canonical marker of an object, or with the nominative particle ga , the canonical marker of a subject. This work reports and discusses the results of corpus-based surveys on the patterns and recent trends in nominative-marking on objects. It will be demonstrated: (i) that there has been an increase in the proportion of accusative-marking over nominative-marking in recent times, (ii) that accusative-marking is more likely to be chosen in certain types of subordinate clauses than in matrix clauses, and (iii) that at least with some types of predicates, accusative-marking on the object is more likely when its referent is animate rather than inanimate. It will be argued that the effects of clause type and animacy have to do with the functional motivation to mitigate processing load and the risk of misinterpretation incurred by nominative-marking on objects.

In addition to the syntactic (inflectional) causative suffix -(s)ase- , Japanese displays a lexical (derivational) causative suffix -(a)se- ( okur-ase- ‘delay’, no-se- ‘place on’) whose a- zero alternation is general in the stem-level phonology. Because the UR of syntactic -(s)ase- must include the s of its postvocalic alternant, the two suffixes necessarily have distinct phonological forms; there is thus no way to treat them as “high attachment” and “low attachment” versions of a single element. The division of labor between syntactic -(s)ase- and lexical -(a)se- invites the conclusion that no causative suffix is syntactic in some cases and lexical in others; if so, causatives pose no challenge to the position that while Japanese inflectional morphology is the phonological realization of syntactic representations, derivational morphology involves lexical listing of stems. The conclusion that there is no causative suffix that spans the syntactic/lexical boundary is validated by showing that forms that have been taken in the literature as exemplifying lexical -(s)ase- are in fact either lexical -(a)se- or syntactic -(s)ase- . As part of this demonstration, it is shown that, with minor exceptions, verb stems in -ase- have arisen as variants of pre-existing stems in -as- , and an explanation for this ongoing process of replacement is proposed.

English has what is called ‘the to think that construction’, in which the subordinate clause (the to -infinitive clause) is used as if it were an independent clause (e.g., To think that she could be so ruthless! ). This paper shows that the to think that construction can be divided into two types depending on the contents of the that clauses: one is the “recall” type, in which the that clauses represent a speaker’s knowledge (i.e., his/her past event or experience); and the other is the “surprise” type, in which the that clauses describe an event at the speech time which the speaker regards as unbelievable. This paper further shows that the “surprise” type of the to think that construction corresponds to the Japanese exclamatory sentence, or the towa / nante construction such as Kodomo-ni anna koto-o iw-are-ru { towa / nante } ! ‘(Lit.) That my child should say such a thing!’.

Informed by the social constructionist framework, with particular reference to “linguistic indexicality” and “the positionality principle”, this study examines how the Japanese conservative journalist Yoshiko Sakurai uses her language to construct seemingly opposite male and female images. It finds that she uses a variety of language forms and strategies, along with other aspects of her image construction, to successfully portray a feminine image ‘package’ while, at the same time, owning a very masculine nationalistic and patriotic ideology and choosing to be linguistically dominating and confrontational as she perceives the situation requires. This study provides empirical evidence to complement and add to previous findings about how Japanese women use linguistic strategies to deal with the power dynamics in their professional lives.