HANDBOOKS OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND LINGUISITCS (Mouton de

Gruyter). Series editors: Masayoshi Shibatani and Taro Kageyama

Book proposal

The Handbook of Japanese Syntax

Volume editors: Masayoshi Shibatani, Shigeru Miyagawa, Hisashi Noda

I. Editors' profiles

Masayoshi Shibatani (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1973)

Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics, Rice University;

Nihongo no Bunseki, Taishūkan Shoten, 1978; The Languages of Japan, Cambridge

University Press, 1990; Approaches to Language Typology, Oxford University Press (co-

edited with Thea Bynon), 1995; Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-

cognition, evolution, John Benjamins (co-edited with T. Givón) 2009; numerous articles

in Language, Journal of Linguistics, Lingua, Linguistics, Japanese/Korean Linguistics,

and others.

Shigeru Miyagawa (Ph.D., University of Arizona, 1980)

Professor of Linguistics and Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order,

Routledge Leading Linguists Series, 2012; Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-

based and Discourse Configurational Languages, MIT Press, 2010; Handbook of

Japanese Linguistics, Oxford University Press (co-edited with M. Saito), 2008; articles in

a variety of journals including Linguistic Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of

East Asian Linguistics, Lingua, and English Linguistics.

Hisashi Noda (Ph.D., University of Tsukuba, 1999)

Professor of Japanese Linguistics and Japanese as a Second Language, Center for JSL

Research and Information, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics,

Tokyo; A program officer of Research Center for Science Systems, Japan Society for the

Promotion of Science; Wa to ga [Japanese particles wa and ga] (Kurosio, 1996), co-

author of Nihongo no bunpō 4: fukubun to danwa [Japanese grammar 4: complex

sentences and discourse] (Iwanami Shoten, 2002); the editor of Nihongo kyōiku no tame

no komyunikēshon Kenkyū [Communication studies for Japanese language education]

(Kurosio, 2012).

II. Timeline

・First submission from the authors: August, 2014

・Internal review, rewriting, and copy-editing: Fall 2014-Summer 2015

・Submission of editor-reviewed complete manuscripts: September 2015

III. Significance of this volume

Studies of Japanese syntax have played a central role in the long history of Japanese

linguistics spanning more than 250 years in Japan and abroad. More recently, Japanese

has been among the languages most intensely studied within modern linguistic theories

such as Generative Grammar and Cognitive/Functional Linguistics over the past fifty

years. This volume presents a comprehensive survey of Japanese syntax from these three

research strands, namely studies based on the traditional research methods developed in

Japan, those from broader functional perspectives, and those couched in the generative

linguistics framework.

The twenty four studies contained in this volume are characterized by a detailed

analysis of a grammatical phenomenon with broader implications to general linguistics,

making the volume attractive to both specialists of Japanese and those interested in

learning about the impact of Japanese syntax to the general study of language. Each

chapter is authored by a leading authority on the topic. Broad issues covered include

sentence types (declarative, imperative, etc.) and their interactions with grammatical

verbal categories (modality, polarity, politeness, etc.), grammatical relations (topic,

subject, etc.), transitivity, nominalizations, grammaticalization, word order (subject,

scrambling, numeral quantifier, configurationality), case marking (ga/no conversion,

morphology and syntax), modification (adjectives, relative clause), and structure and

interpretation (modality, negation, prosody, ellipsis). These topics have had a profound

impact on the study of Japanese syntax, and each also has had important roles in the

development of general linguistic theory. For example, the long sustained studies on the

grammatical relations of subject and topic in Japanese have had significant impacts on

the study of grammatical relations in European as well as Austronesian languages. In the

study of word order, the analysis of Japanese numeral quantifiers is used as one of the

leading pieces of evidence for the existence of A-movement in human language. Under

case marking, the way subjects are case marked in Japanese has played a central role in

the study of case marking in the Altaic family of languages. For modification, the recent

studies of nominalizations have been central to the analysis of modification and nominal

clauses in a wide variety of languages from around the globe. And the study of how in

Japanese prosody plays a crucial role in interpretation has become the basis for some

important recent developments in the study of wh-questions.

IV. Organization of the volume

This book is organized in three parts. Part 1 contains papers developing out of the

traditional research paradigm of Japanese linguistics. They deal with such central issues

as characterizations of sentence types, functional and formal definitions of sentences and

clauses, and the functions of grammatical relations subject and topic. Part 2 represents

studies demonstrating functional linguistic methods and their achievements in Japanese.

A variety of topics including transitivity, nominalization, and grammaticalization are

dealt with in this section. Finally, Part 3 is a collection of thirteen papers representing

generative approaches to Japanese syntax covering some central syntactic issues such as

argument structures, and case marking, as well as interface topics such as morphology-

syntax and syntax-prosody interactions.

V. Table of contents

The following is the table of contents with a summary of each chapter by its author(s).

Introduction: Shigeru Miyagawa, Masayoshi Shibatani, Hisashi Noda

The introduction written jointly by the three editors offers both broad overview of the

field of Japanese syntax and a summary of the significance of the papers contained in this

volume.

Part 1

1. Basic Structures of Sentences and Grammatical Categories, Yoshio Nitta,

Kansai University of Foreign Studies

Sentences can be classified into predicate sentences and those composed of independent

words based on its internal structure. In this chapter, the internal structures of different

sentence types will be discussed with a focus on predicates. From the perspective of a

signaling function, predicate sentences can be divided into declarative, interrogative,

imperative, and volitional sentences. Based on the content, predicate sentences can be

separated into active, situational, and categorical sentences. Sentences mainly consist of a

proposition and modality. Modalities and the grammatical categories in which they

appear differ depending on sentence types. An epistemic modality will not appear in

imperative sentences, while a conveyance modality will be structurally latent in

declarative sentences. Moreover, aspects appear in active sentences but not in situational

and categorical sentences. Tense semantics of tense forms in categorical sentences differ

from those in other types of sentences.

Predicates assume a dominant position among the components of a sentence. Various

grammatical categories are represented as morphological changes in predicates. In

Japanese, both affirmation/negation and politeness can be achieved by the conjugation of

predicates—a principal method in grammatical category formations. Affirmation or

negation can be represented with the dichotomy of hasiru (I’ll run)–hasiranai (I won’t

run), while politeness can be represented with hasiru (I’ll run)–hasirimasu (I will run)

and ookii (it’s big)–ookiidesu (it is big)–ookyuugozaimasu (it is big). That the

affirmation/negation polarity is a grammatical category is seen from the fact that a

negative polarity item such as mettani (hardly) alone cannot express a negative assertion,

as shown by the ungrammaticality of mettani hasiru (hardly runs).

2. Sentence and Predicate Phrase, Hiroyuki Shirakawa, Hiroshima University

In traditional Japanese linguistics the structure of a predicate phrase has long been

discussed vigorously as an issue inseparable from the problem of “the formation of a

sentence”, since a predicate at the end of a sentence determines whether the sentence is

completed, or suspended and to be continued, and it also bears relation to both

proposition and modality. This chapter views some of the traditional studies of the

predicate phrase and presents modern approaches to the predicate phrase.

Firstly discussed are the controversies over the notion of “predication” that attracted

much attention among traditional Japanese grammarians. We will survey the history of

the controversies over chinjutsu (predication), beginning with Yamada (1908), who first

used the term chinjutsu and explained the structure of a sentence in terms of the predicate

function of “predication”, and ending with Watanabe (1971) , who argued that the alleged

unique function of a predicate had to be analyzed as a dual function. It will be shown that

the traditional studies of the Japanese language had original views of sentence

construction that are similar to the recent discussions of modality.

Secondly, turning our viewpoint from sentence-grammar to discourse-grammar,

sentence formation will be studied at the discourse level. We will discuss the relation of a

predicate phrase and a sentence, taking into account of such works as Noda (1989) and

Shirakawa (2009). The former argues that some sentences have no real modality and are

dependent on some other sentence and are thus semantically equivalent to dependent

clauses, while the latter argue that some predicate phrases behave like a full-fledged

sentence in discourse and thus are modally equivalent to an independent sentence.

A discussion on future directions in the study of predicate phrases concludes this

chapter.

3. Sentencehood of Japanese Subordinate Clauses, Isao Iori, Hitotsubashi

University

There is a rather strict sequential order imposed on the grammatical morphemes in

Japanese verb sentences. The order is correlated with the hierarchical structure of

sentences. This structure has been discussed in modern Japanese grammar from the view

point of the structure of complex sentences. Minami (1974) and Mikami (1953), the most

important achievements in this field, raise a question how the “finiteness” of a verb

should be understood in Japanese. Takubo (1987), which modifies the Minami’s model,

asserts that Minami’s four groups of subordinate clauses, Groups A, B, C and D,

correspond with the syntactic-semantic types of action, event, judgment, and

communication, respectively. Arita (2007) investigates the Group B subordinate clauses

closely and points out that there are two types in tense realized in the group.

With these studies as a background, this chapter deals with the internal structures of

subordinate clauses. I will explore the questions of how different types of grammatical

categories are structured in a clause and how they correlate with the semantic functions of

clauses.

4. Topic and Subject, Takashi Masuoka, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies,

This chapter centers around the notions of topic and subject in Japanese. These notions

are fundamental to sentence-grammatical descriptions in Japanese, since topic and

subject phrases figure importantly in the composition of the Japanese sentence. This

chapter is not intended as a purely structural analysis, in that the notions of topic and

subject are discussed from the viewpoint that sentence grammar is concerned with the

form-meaning correspondence.

Research on Japanese sentence grammar has produced a vast amount of literature on

the topic/subject. Thus, the first part of this chapter provides a survey of the previous

research results, focusing on (i) the perspective of language typology with respect to the

topic/subject, (ii) the perspective of the predication type, i.e., “property predication” vs.

“event predication,” and (iii) the perspective of the prototypicality of the topic/subject.

Based on the survey, the second part presents a view on the topic/subject controversy,

to the effect that Japanese belongs to the language type which has prototypical topic and

non-prototypical subject. This thesis is a synthesis of the three perspectives mentioned in

the first part. The basic stance of the chapter is that such fundamental notions as the

topic/subject are to be elucidated from a contrastive/typological point of view.

The final section points out some related issues that would stimulate further studies of

the topic/subject in Japanese.

5. Toritate: Focusing/defocusing Words, Phrases, and Clauses, Hisashi Noda,

National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

This chapter will discuss toritate or focusing/defocusing markers that are especially well

developed in Japanese. Toritate markers serve to place or displace focus on words,

phrases, or clauses. They represent meanings similar to the English words only, too, and

even. Most Japanese toritate markers are toritate particles, which are placed after items

that have to be focused on. However, toritate adverbs are placed before focused items.

Toritate markers have been traditionally distinguished as adverbial particles that add

meaning only to words that the marker attaches to and as binding particles that cause

ending links related to the formation of entire sentences—the phenomenon known as

kakari-busubi. Studies conducted for modern Japanese, in which the kakari-musubi

phenomenon no longer obtains, have been still rigorously analyzing toritate markers from

semantic and syntactic perspectives by handling both adverbial and binding particles as a

unified phenomenon.

From a semantic perspective, toritate markers can be categorized into those

representing contrasts (i.e., wa), similarities (i.e., mo), restrictions (i.e., dake), and

limitations (i.e., sae). On the other hand, from a syntactic perspective, toritate markers

can be categorized into those functioning at the aspectual level (i.e., bakari), the

affirmation/negation level (i.e., sika), the reality level (i.e., nara), and the level of

addressee-oriented modality (i.e., koso).

Significant tasks for the future research include those dealing with crosslingusitic

variations in the use of toritate markers.

Part 2

6. Functional Syntax, Ken-Ichi Takami, Gakushuin University and Susumu Kuno,

Harvard University

In this paper we will first review briefly the theory of Functional Syntax proposed by

Susumu Kuno and some of the advances in the study of Japanese syntax it has made

possible. Functional Syntax has amply shown how important it is to bear in mind

nonsyntactic (semantic, discourse-based or pragmatic) factors that interact with syntactic

phenomena and how dangerous it is to draw sweeping generalizations only on the basis

of limited syntactic notions such as ‘c-command’ or the ‘unergative/ unaccusative’

distinction. In the first part of this paper, we will illustrate the significance of

nonsyntactic factors such as Point of View or Empathy, Flow-of-Information Principle,

and Humanness, by taking up a number of phenomena in Japanese.

In the second part of this paper, we will discuss from our Functional Syntax

perspective the –te aru construction, as in Mado ga ake-te aru ‘The windows have been

opened’, but not *Kodomo ga home-te aru ‘The child has been praised’ (what Martin

(1975) calls the ‘intransitivizing resultative’ construction). It has generally been held in

traditional Japanese grammar and Japanese language teaching that this construction

shows that a result brought about by an action is still in force at the moment of speech

and that the action described in this construction is one performed in preparation for

something (e.g. Takahashi 1969, Yoshikawa 1973, Teramura 1984, Jorden 1963). On the

other hand, Kageyama (1996) has argued in the framework of lexical semantics that only

transitive verbs that intentionally bring about a change of state or a change of location

can appear in this construction. (Miyagawa (1989) made a similar claim using the notion

of ‘Theme’.) We will argue, however, that these formulations leave many examples

unaccounted for. We will then make clear that it is essential to differentiate the actor

(agent) of the action described in the –te aru construction from the observer (speaker) of

the action, and propose the following: The –te aru construction shows that (i) it is

obvious to the speaker that the intentional action the verb represents was performed by

someone for a certain purpose in the past, and (ii) the state brought about by the action is

significant to the speaker at the moment of speech. We will further demonstrate that this

constraint can account not only for a wide range of examples of the ‘X-ga … -te aru’

construction, but also for those of the ‘X-o … -te aru’ construction (what Martin (1975)

calls the ‘possessive resultative’ construction), as in Mado o ake-te aru ‘I have opened

the windows’, and those involving intransitive verbs, as in Moo zyuubun ason-de aru

‘I’ve already played enough’. Finally, we will consider in the third part of the paper

further directions of Functional Syntax (or, more broadly, functional linguistics in

general) and what else it can contribute to the study of Japanese syntax.

7. Transitivity, Wesley Jacobsen, Harvard University

Transitivity in Japanese is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing syntactic, semantic,

and morphological dimensions. What counts as a transitive predicate can be defined

independently in terms of any of these three dimensions, with results that do not perfectly

overlap, raising the question of whether grammatical transitivity is in fact a unitary

concept or not. The traditional syntactic definition of a transitive predicate as one that

“takes a direct object” picks out as transitive, in its formal Japanese counterpart,

predicates that co-occur with accusative o-marked nouns (e.g., A ga B o naguru “A hits

B”). But in a broader semantic sense, any two-place predicate may be viewed as

transitive, thus including predicates where the second argument is marked with case

particles other than accusative o (e.g., A ga B to tigau “A differs from B,” A ga B ni au

“A fits/matches B”). This chapter explores the question of why it is that, of the various

ways the second argument is encoded among these predicates (to, ni, and o on the B

arguments in the above examples), o-marking is given privileged place as a marker of

transitivity. It will be argued that the various meanings of accusative o constructions

center around a core “prototype” meaning that is defined (contra past treatments of

prototype such as Hopper and Thompson 1980) by the presence of intentionality, either

in the sense of one entity exerting intentional control in bringing about an effect on

another entity (A ga B o kowasu “A breaks B”) or by mentally intending it as an

experiencer (A ga B o miru “A sees B,” A ga higai o ukeru “A receives damage”).

The presence of verb pairs where transitive and intransitive verbs are distinguished by

means of suffix oppositions (e.g., A ga B o ageru “A raises B” vs. B ga agaru “B rises;”

A ga B o naosu “A fixes B” vs. B ga naoru “B gets fixed”) provides yet a third,

morphological basis for defining a transitive verb in Japanese. None of the three

criteria—syntactic, semantic, or morphological—delimits exactly the same class of

transitive predicates. Following Næss (2007), this chapter will argue that despite this

apparent divergence, all three manifestations of transitivity encode in common a notional

distinction between relatively lower (intransitive) and relatively higher (transitive)

differentiation between two entities, along a cline defined by maximal differentiation at

one pole and zero differentiation at the other.

8. Nominalizations, Masayoshi Shibatani, Rice University

Nominalizations in Japanese grammar were first recognized by Yoshio Yamada in his

impressive compendium of Japanese grammar Nihon Bunpōron [Japanese grammatical

theory] published in 1908. Taking Yamada (1908) as a starting point, this chapter

advances a new theory of nominalization both correcting a large number of errors we

have made over the phenomena in which nominalizations play a central role and offering

several new treatments for them. The theory proposed makes the following points: (1)

structures and their uses must be clearly distinguished, (2) following point (1), so-called

relative clauses are nothing but a use of nominalizations—there are nothing like relative

clauses apart from nominlizations used as a modifier, (3) there are N-based (strictly NP-

based) nominalizations along with V-based nominalizations, (4) point (3) obviates the

genitive no and so-called pronominal no as well as a deletion analysis for a certain type

of no, thereby unifying various no’s that have been proposed in the past into a single

nominalizing no. Data are drawn from both Modern and Classical Japanese as well as

various modern Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects.

9. Locative Alternation, Seizi Iwata, Osaka City University

Certain verbs are known to alternate between two ways of argument realization: either a

Theme realized as direct object as in (1a) or a Location as direct object as in (1b).

(1) a. kabe-ni penki-o nuru (ni-variant)

wall on paint ACC smear

‘smear paint on the wall’

b. kabe-o penki-de nuru (de-variant)

wall ACC paint with smear

‘smear the wall with paint’

In the literature it has been claimed that the alternation arises when the verb involves the

notion of “affectedness” (Fukui, Miyagawa and Tenny 1985) or that the two variants are

to be characterized in terms of the contrast between a change of location vs. a change of

state (Kishimoto 2001). Both analyses, however, are problematic. What is essential is

that the verb has the potential to be construed either as a put-type verb or a cover/fill-type

verb. This analysis easily extends to cases involving verbs suffixed with –tsukusu. In

order to systematically account for the possibility of locative alternation, however, far

more reference to world knowledge needs to be made than appears at first sight.

10. Grammaticalization, Heiko Narrog, Tohoku University

Grammaticalization theory aims to explain synchronic language structures through their

diachronic emergence. It offers an alternative to purely synchronic views of language

structure and has therefore become an important pillar of functionalist theories of

language. Nevertheless, it has recently even attracted interest from generative grammar.

Studies of grammaticalization in Japanese have traditionally focused on the pragmatic

aspect of the phenomenon, which is salient in the development of honorific marking and

sentence-final particles, for example. This article will focus on the more structural aspects

of grammaticalization in Japanese, namely morphology, syntax and, related to them,

semantics. In particular, the author will attempt to show how grammaticalization in

Japanese relates to recent theories of syntax.

Part 3

11. Configurationality, John Whitman, National Institute for Japanese Language

and Linguistics

Since Hale's pioneering proposal that divided the world's languages into configurational

and nonconfigurational languages, a great deal of work has been produced to argue for

and against Hale's original notion that Japanese is nonconfigurational, thus lacking a VP

node. While this view that Japanese is, in fact, configurational, has become the standard

assumption, a number of phenomena, including word order flexibility, still remain a

mystery, a mystery for which the original conception of Japanese as a nonconfigurational

language had a simple and elegant solution. It is possible to regard Japanese as a

configurational language but at the same time show how it has nonconfigurational

properties in specific areas of the grammar.

12. Scrambling, Noriko Yoshimura, Shizuoka Prefectural University

This chapter discusses the nature of scrambling in Japanese from the perspectives of

syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Properties discussed include the optionality of

scrambling, the A- vs. A-bar distinction relative to short- vs. long-distance movement,

vacuous movement related to radical reconstruction effects, and focus/topic-inducing

analysis related to landing site in CP vs. TP. By exploring these issues, this discussion

attempts to answer questions raised by recent advances in the study of Japanese

linguistics indicating that, although scrambling takes place in narrow syntax, its

significant interpretative consequences emerge at the syntax-pragmatics interface.

13. Numeral Quantifiers, Shigeru Miyagawa, MIT

The study of floating quantifiers in English, French, Irish, and Japanese has had a

significant impact on linguistic theory. The floating numeral quantifiers in Japanese has

shown that A-movement is a bona fide operation in natural language; we can see this by

the fact that such quantifiers may be stranded precisely where one expects the copy of A-

movement to occur — direct passive and unaccusative constructions and one form of

scrambling. More recently, in response to a number of counterexamples, it has been

proposed that the A-movement that leaves a copy is sensitive to aspect, specifically,

whether a predicate is telic or atelic.

14. Syntax and Argument Structure, Natsuko Tsujimura, Indiana University

Research on predicate argument structure has revealed a number of intriguing issues

relevant to morphology, semantics, syntax, as well as their interface areas. There have

been different theoretical approaches to argument structure, particularly focusing on the

way in which the relation between verb meaning and the distribution of a verb’s

arguments in syntax should be captured. Included in the set of proposed views are

“projectionist” and “constructionist” approaches, as well as the theory of “preferred

argument structure”. There has been a body of work that touches directly and indirectly

on argument structure in syntax and in syntax-lexical semantic interface in Japanese. This

chapter will first illustrate that past investigations of argument structure in Japanese have

made significant contributions to debates surrounding argument structure and have

enriched our understanding of the topic both typologically and theoretically. The chapter

will then discuss some data, including language acquisition, formation of innovative

verbs, and mimetic verbs, to examine the extent to which each of the Japanese

phenomena appeals to a specific view of argument structure (e.g. projectionist,

constructionist) and conversely the challenges that it presents.

15. Subject, Masatoshi Koizumi, Tohoku University

This chapter considers syntactic positions of subject in Japanese. In particular, it

discusses (i) whether the external argument of transitive verbs is base-generated in Spec,

TP or it is initially merged to a lower position (e.g. Spec, vP); (ii) (if the latter is the case)

whether it must, may, or must not move to a higher position; (iii) wither or not it can

undergo scrambling to a position higher than Spec, TP; and so on. My tentative

conclusion at this moment is that (i’) the external argument is external-merged with a

verbal projection; (ii’) whether it moves out of its initial position depends on factors such

as its categorial status, whether or not the object has moved across it, etc.; and (iii’) it can

move to a position higher than Spec, TP.

16. Case Marking, Hideki Kishimoto, Kobe University

The present chapter presents a survey on case marking, which plays a very important role

in Japanese grammar. This chapter begins by introducing the notion of structural and

inherent case marking, while explicating a difference in this conception between

generative grammar and traditional Japanese linguistics. After laying out the basics of

case marking in Japanese, this chapter discusses how case marking interacts with

syntactic structures, taking up some prominent issues on case marking, such as the

nominative-case and the double-o constraints, nominative-genitive conversion,

implemented via embedding under relative or nominal-complement clauses and via

possessor raising (as found in the so-called major-subject construction), and other case

alternation phenomena (such as one found in the locative alternation). For the up-to-date

research, this chapter makes an investigation of how case marking affects the syntactic

position of subjects, and argues that their structural position varies according to whether

tense licenses nominative case marking on an argument.

17. Ga/No Conversion, Masao Ochi, Osaka University

Since the seminal work by Harada (1971, 1976), the nominative/genitive case alternation

has received a great amount of attention in the literature on Japanese syntax (Bedell 1972,

Shibatani 1975, Nakai 1980, and Saito 1983 among many others). The first half of this

chapter reviews two major lines of approach to this construction, the D-licensing

approach (Miyagawa 1993, Ochi 2001 among others) and the C-licensing approach

(Watanabe 1996, Hiraiwa 2000 among others), by highlighting their advantages and

shortcomings. The second half of the chapter attempts to achieve the following: (a) to

provide a comprehensive account of the ‘mixed’ pattern of the nominative/genitive

subject and the nominative/genitive object of stative predicates (see Miyagawa 1993,

2011), and (b) to explain why the genitive subject cannot be focused (see Akaso and

Haraguchi 2011, Miyagawa 2011, 2012, 2013) while an element other than the genitive

subject can be focused in the same construction. The chapter will discuss these issues in a

cross-linguistic perspective, drawing insights from works on other languages, such as

Turkish, that also possess genitive subject constructions.

18. Passives, Tomoko Ishizuka, Tama University

This chapter investigates the passive voice system in Japanese within the framework of

generative grammar. Japanese passive voice system is extremely rich and is

conventionally divided into two types—direct and indirect passives. Unifying the two

types while assuming a single lexical entry of the passive morpheme -rare is theoretically

a desirable hypothesis, but it has never been successful (see Hoshi 1999). The difficulty

comes from the well-known phenomenon that unlike the direct passive, the indirect

passive appears not to contain a gap corresponding to the nominative subject (Kuno

1973). This chapter, however, questions this fundamental assumption and advances a

minimalist analysis that unifies Japanese passives by reanalyzing indirect passives as

pseudo-passives—passives with a gap in oblique and genitive positions. This analysis

brings the passive voice in Japanese much closer to those in Western languages.

19. Modification, Akira Watanabe, University of Tokyo

How attributive modification works in Japanese is becoming a hot topic in recent years.

The basic issue has been whether Japanese has the kind of adnominal modification

structure found in languages like English and Italian. In this chapter, I will show that a

more fundamental question of identifying subclasses of adjectives must be addressed

before we can obtain meaningful results for adnominal modification in general. Different

semantically-defined classes of adjectives are recruited for particular purposes of

modification. An initial observation is that some basic classes can be recognized in

Japanese, but certain classes are absent. The source, and the extent, of variation are not

known yet. A preliminary conclusion, though, is that UG-based structure exists for

attributive modification. I will also argue that the conclusion about attributive

modification is significant in other areas of syntax involving extraction.

20. Relative Clause, Yoichi Miyamoto, Osaka University

This chapter discusses syntactic properties of relative clauses in Japanese. In contrast to

their European counterparts, one notable characteristic of Japanese relative clauses is the

lack of overt relative pronouns (Fukui 2006, Fukui and Takano 2000, among others). One

other contrast to their European counterparts is the absence of island effects (Kuno 1973,

Murasugi 1991, among others). These observations already suggest the lack of the

position for a relative pronoun altogether (Murasugi 1991). In essence, Japanese relative

clauses have a categorial status contrasting with that of their European counterparts.

However, Hiraiwa (2001, 2002) argues that ga/no conversion in Japanese requires this

particular position, despite the absence of any overt relative pronoun. In light of such

debate, this chapter first reviews work on issues surrounding Japanese relative clauses,

and elucidates their syntactic properties, including the absence of island effects, the

unavailability of N’-ellipsis (Saito, Lin, and Murasugi 2008), and the presence of ga/no

conversion (Maki and Uchibori 2008, Miyagawa 1993, among others). The chapter then

shows that in order to account for these properties, the categorial status and the

derivational steps of Japanese relative clauses both need considering. On this basis, the

chapter proceeds by analyzing the properties of the clauses under discussion, paying

particular attention to the fact that the predicate of a Japanese relative clause is in the

noun-modifying form or the rentai form under traditional Japanese grammar. The

proposed analysis demonstrates intricate interaction between the categorial status and the

derivational steps in Japanese relative clauses.

21. Modality, Nobuko Hasegawa, Kanda University of International Studies

Modality in the traditional language research of Japanese is taken as an expression that is

concerned with the speaker’s attitude toward the propositional content and has two types;

epistemic and speech act. Epistemic modality, such as yoo-da ‘seem’, may constitute a

class of predicates that have to do with the probability of the proposition expressed. This

chapter, however, mainly deals with Speech Act modality that gives rise to different

sentence types, imperatives, volitionals, etc., which requires either the speaker or the

hearer as a subject. This requirement is analyzed as a process of the Spec-Head

agreement between the subject and the modality at the level of CP, accounting for the

phenomena of the so-called kakari-musubi. Then, it is extended to subordinate CPs,

where certain focus expressions correspond to particular subordinate markers.

22. Expressions That Contain Negation, Nobuaki Nishioka, Kyushu University

Linguistic phenomena involving negation manifest an intriguing aspect of clause

structures in Japanese, and previous analyses as well as the data involved still need to be

carefully examined. The phenomena include (i) the scope of negation (ii) the licensing

mechanism of negative sensitive items (NSIs) such as wh-MO (e.g. daRE-MO ‘who-MO’,

naNI-MO ‘what-MO), XP-sika and other elements whose distributions are limited only to

negative sentences. In this chapter, focusing on the syntactic aspects of the above-

mentioned phenomena, I attempt to demonstrate how the complexity of the phenomena

can be explicated with new data. After reviewing some previous analyses, I show the

elusiveness of the scope of negation in Japanese is resolved by observing data from the

Kumamoto dialect (KD) of Japanese. The data from KD clearly show us the syntactic

position of the subject as well as the syntactic position of Neg and contribute to

elucidating the clause structures of Japanese. After arguing that NSIs should be classified

at least into three types, following Miyagawa, Nishioka and Zeijlstra (2013), I suggest an

analysis in which the behaviors of NSIs naturally follow from the respective features of

the three types. The key notions of the analysis will be ‘focus’ and ‘topic’, as Miyagawa

(2010) argues that Japanese is a discourse-configurational language based on topic/focus.

Finally I discuss the implications of the analysis of NSIs in Japanese for the cross-

linguistic study of negative sentences since the study of negation in European languages

tends to classify NSIs only into two types, negative concord items (NCIs) and negative

polarity items (NPIs).

23. Morphology and Syntax, Yoko Sugioka, Keio University

Morphology-syntax interface has been the focus of the long-standing debates concerning

the place of morphology in grammar. While the lexicalists view words as syntactic

‘atoms’ listed in the lexicon that cannot be manipulated by syntactic rules, the

constructionists (or syntacticists) claim that words are built in syntax as phrases are.

Japanese as an agglutinative language has a wide array of word formation processes,

from those displaying lexical properties to a number of productive affixation processes

that involve interaction with syntax. After reviewing the discussion of each type and the

claims made in the past literature, this chapter explores special aspectual affixes in

Japanese as a major type of morphological operation on syntactic structure. The affixes

such as -tyuu (progressive), -zumi (perfective), mi- (imperfective) attaching to nominals,

and -kake (‘be about to’) and -tate (‘has just done’) attaching to verbs, will be discussed

in relation to selection of phrasal and lexical categories (VP, NP, N) as their host,

inducing or barring Genitive case alternations depending on their own category (N or

Asp), e.g. ronbun-o/no sippitu-tyuu (ni) ‘while writing a paper’ vs. ronbun-o/*no sippitu-

zumi da ‘has completed writing a paper,’ and forming property-ascribing predicates that

can form a compound noun as well (sippitu-zumi-genkoo ‘completed manuscript’). The

multiple facets of these affixes point to the difficulty of relegating morphology to one

component (syntax or the lexicon) as opposed to taking a modular view.

24. Syntax and Prosody, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, Indiana University

This chapter investigates how prosody should be treated in the study of syntax. It first

reviews the major developments of the formal accounts of prosody-syntax interaction as

well as prosody-pragmatics correlation, taking up the wh-interrogatives of Japanese as a

case study. It then discusses how syntax can and should synchronize phonetic properties

of a sentence with its semantic interpretation while deriving them separately. The final

part of the chapter explores a future direction of generative syntax by extending the

analysis of prosody-syntax-semantics interaction to that of overt syntax in general. It will

be argued that such a move will allow us to achieve the proper association of various

surface forms and semantico-pragmatic interpretations appealing to a familiar

grammatical device and restriction on syntactic operations. The empirical coverage

encompasses the interaction of case morphology, adjacency, overt movement, and

prosody with thematic interpretation, predication and information packaging.

Subject index