Volume 39, Issue 2

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)

In 1910, Ogura Shinpei published a meticulous critique of Benjamin Smith Lyman’s famous 1894 article on rendaku . In the course of a thorough examination of compounds consisting of a single Sino-Japanese morpheme followed by /su/∼/zu/ ‘to do’, Ogura noted that all the examples with rendaku (i.e., with /zu/) have a monosyllabic first element. This observation invites the inference that there is a causal connection between first-element monosyllabicity and rendaku in X+/zu/ compounds, but a careful review of the history of these vocabulary items indicates that the correlation between monosyllabicity and rendaku is just an accident. There is no reason to believe that first-element monosyllabicity has ever been an active phonological constraint, and the pattern that Ogura identified cannot be used to bolster the view that syllables distinct from moras are real units in modern Tokyo Japanese.

This study considers the use of dialectal and distinctive language features in three Japanese translations of the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1938, 2015, and 2015–2016. Previous studies have noted that these translations adopt various linguistic features originating in dialects from Japan’s Tōhoku region when rendering the African American Vernacular English–influenced eye dialect spoken by Black enslaved characters, and suggest that this translation strategy draws on and reinforces negative social perceptions of real-life Tōhoku-dialect speakers. Conversely, through a dual approach involving both a comparative textual analysis and a quantitative perceptual survey, this study argues that these speech styles should be viewed rather as an enregistered form of “role language”: a speech variety unique to fictional contexts serving to identify a character archetype that in the eyes of a majority of readers is disassociated from any historical origin.

This study illustrates the pragmatic functions of 笑 ( wara ), the kanji or Chinese character meaning “laughter,” on the text messaging application LINE, and identifies the online communication strategies using it across 68 text message chats shared by Japanese university students who insert this and other laughter characters in their text conversations. The study’s results suggest that various laughter characters, including (笑), 笑 and w , act as contextualization cues at the end of the sentence, performing three distinct functions: acknowledging humor in the preceding proposition, inviting laughter, and softening the illocutionary force. Analyzed using politeness theory, the second and third functions are respectively categorized as positive politeness and negative politeness. This study also argues that the first function reflects the writer’s subjectivity, whereas the second and third reflect the writer’s intersubjectivity.