Grammatical Relations, Reflexives and Pseudo

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Grammatical Relations, Reflexives and Pseudo GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS, REFLEXIVES AND PSEUDO-RAISING IN JAPANESE by Hidematsu Miura May 9, 2008 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the State University of New York at Buffalo in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics Copyright by Hidematsu Miura 2008 ii To my parents, Eiki Miura and Hiroko Miura iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis adviser, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. This thesis would not have appeared without him and his theory (RRG). His assistance in the process of writing this thesis was extraordinary. He always gave me sound and sharp comments and readily answered all of my questions, including very trivial ones. I feel very fortunate and grateful to have completed this thesis under his guidance. I would also like to thank the other two members of my thesis committee, Mitsuaki Shimojo and Robert Hoeing, for reading the thesis and giving me many insightful comments. I learned from Shimojo-sensee Japanese language pedagogy as well as Japanese linguistics. I was fortunate to work for him as a research assistant during the summer in 1999 for his project on the internally-headed relative clause in Japanese, which was later published as Shimojo (2002). Bob readily accepted my offer to be the third reader of my thesis. His questions reminded me of things I would not have thought of. I am also grateful to all the faculty members in the Linguistics Department at UB, including, especially, Matthew Dryer, Jeri Jaeger, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and David Zubin. I learned, from all of them, so much about linguistics and, especially, the joy of doing linguistics. Jeri's phonetics class, held in the very first semester of my graduate life at UB, was one of the few most memorable classes in my life. David Zubin was too enthusiastic to remember the ending time of his class and sometimes Van 'liberated' the students (captives?). I would also like to thank the administrative staff in the department for always making sure every bureaucratic document is correctly filed for me, including Carole Orsolits and Jodi L. Reiner. Many thanks go to my fellow linguists at Buffalo for their friendship and encouragement, including Osamu Amazaki, Kathy Conklin, Jennifer Cornish, Lilian Graciela Guerrero-Valenzuela, Akio Hasegawa, Sunyoung Hong, Osamu Ishiyama, Kazuhiro Kawachi, iv Kazunori Kimura, Nuttanart Muansuwan, Atsuko Nishiyama, Chris Phipps, Shigeyasu Sawada, Yukiko Sugiyama, Kozue Takubo, Kimio Tanihara, Kiyoko Toratani, Joy Wu, and Takashi Yoshida. Special thanks go to Jennifer Cornish and Kevin Baird. Without their friendship, I could not have survived the six-year graduate life in the United States. They always invited me to their cozy house and, even during the hectic final weeks of a semester (time to write term-papers!), spending time with them was a really relaxing moment. Especially, Jennifer, as a fellow student, always gave me moral as well as academic support from the very beginning of my life at Buffalo. She read the final draft of this thesis and pointed out many grammatical and stylistic mistakes for me at the final stage of thesis-writing. I owe another big thanks to Anant Gopal. He helped me so much during the five years we lived together in a small apartment. We discussed various topics at night, eating a pizza and drinking a beer. I cannot forget the delicious Indian dishes he cooked. Without him and his friendship, my life at Buffalo would have been much more monotonous one. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my teachers, student colleagues and friends in Japan for their various supports: Teruhiro Ishiguro, Casilda Luzares, Satoru Nakai, Nobuyuki Yamauchi, Naoyuki Akaso, Chiharu Kikuta (Uda), Katsunori Fujioka, Norifumi Ito, Toshiharu Kitabayashi, Masanobu Horiguchi, Hideki Oiwa, Kazuki Ishizaki, Yutaka Shinoda, Yo-ichiro Hasebe; Sachiko Toba (Nishikawa), Atsushi Yuhaku; Kenji Kojima, Atsushi Kato, Takahiro Tajima and Nori Watanabe. Finally, I cannot express my gratitude enough to my parents, Eiki Miura and Hiroko Miura. They gave me moral support and encouraged me. Without their understanding, I could not pursue my interest in linguistics. v Notes on gloss and abbreviations [ On glossing ] In terms of the typological adequacy, I will base the abbreviations on the Leipzig Glossing Rules with my own additions (available at [http://www.eva.mpg.de/]). Many of the data are directly cited from the preceding studies or adopted with some modification. In either case, the glossing style has been changed for paper-internal consistency. Morpheme by morpheme glosses are given when the morphological makeup is crucial for the discussion; otherwise, a sloppy gloss is given. In the following pair, for example, the first type, (i), will be given when tense is being discussed as a crucial element; otherwise, the second one will be given instead. It should be kept in mind, therefore, that even though no segmentation is given, the unsegmented word is not necessarily a non-segmentable mono-morpheme. i. Taroo-ga chooshoku-o tabe-ta Taroo-NOM breakfast-ACC eat-PST ‘Taroo ate breakfast.’ ii. Taroo-ga chooshoku-o tabeta Taroo-NOM breakfast-ACC eat.pst ‘Taroo ate breakfast.’ [ Judgment ] Judgments of the linguistic data are crucial for discussion in linguistics. As mentioned above, many examples are cited from the preceding literature. I agree with the original judgment unless noted otherwise. Some examples are based on my own intuition as a native speaker of the language. vi [ On human NPs ] The following two names will be employed as consistently as possible: Taroo and Hanako. These are a male and female name respectively that are often considered typical Japanese first names, which is not necessarily true. [Symbols and abbreviations ] * ungrammatical # odd (possibly pragmatic rather than syntactic) Ø zero realization (this symbol is for expository/descriptive purposes only) (int.) 'intended’ meaning that the hypothetical (ungrammatical) sentence denotes (lit.) ‘literal’ (or direct) translation ??? the hypothetical sentence is unintelligible (uninterpretable) A actor ABL ablative ACC accusative agr agreement ALA allative ASP aspect AT actor of transitive verb AUXX auxiliary X (where X is the original form in the language) BEN benefactive CAUS causative CFP clause-final particle CX clause-linkage marker X (where X is the original form in the language) CL (numeral) classifier COND conditional COM comitative COP copula DAT dative DCA direct core argument DCAINV direct core argument in inversion construction ('x' argument in [pred'(x, y)]) demA demoted actor DES desiderative d.n.a does not apply d-S derived intransitive subject EMP emphatic f feminine FQ Floating Quantifier FVV84 Foley and Van Valin 1984 FocP focus particle HR-CA highest ranking core argument HR-DCA highest ranking direct core argument HON honorific vii IMP imperative INST instrumental Int.mod intention modality LDP left detached position LR-DCA lowest ranking direct core argument LSC layered structure of the clause LOC locative m masculine MR macrorole N neuter neg negative NOM nominative npst non-past (present) NUC nuclear PASS passive pl plural pol polite pot potential PoCS postcore slot PrCS precore slot PRED predicate PST past RDP right detached position S 'subject' of intransitive predicates (i.e. [A,U]) SFP sentence final particle sg singular TOP topic U undergoer UINV undergoer in inversion construction ('y' argument in [pred'(x, y)]) UT undergoer of transitive verb VV05 Van Valin 2005 VVLP97 Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 3 third person viii Abstract This thesis consists of two parts. The first part is a theoretical description of grammatical relations in Japanese (Chapter 3). The second part addresses three theoretical issues of two constructions discussed in the first part of the thesis, a reflexive construction (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) and a pseudo-raising construction (Chapter 6). In Chapter 3, grammatical relations of the Japanese language will be detailed. Though there are several studies which examined grammatical relations in Japanese in the past, all of them are neither comprehensive nor conclusive. This thesis attempts to give a more comprehensive and fresh look at the grammatical relations of Japanese. More than twenty constructions, including less discussed oblique 'subject' constructions, are examined in terms of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) which has developed a fine-grained system to analyze grammatical relations. In Chapter 4, a long-standing issue of the antilocality effect seen in the Japanese reflexive constructions is addressed. It is first shown that the antilocality effect of the Japanese reflexives has nothing to do with the notion of lexical reflexivity advocated in the literature. It is demonstrated that the antilocality of the Japanese reflexive is due to a peculiar subcategorization nature of the 'antilocal verbs'. That is, what we call 'antilocal verbs' do not allow metonymy and require NPs of certain meaning (quale). It is concluded that the antilocality effect is not specific to reflexive constructions and, accordingly, there is no need to posit a constraint on the behavior of the reflexive itself. For a formal treatment, RRG representation and qualia structure are employed. In Chapter 5, an interpretive issue of the reflexive construction which has not been discussed before in the literature will be addressed. Two things will be demonstrated. First, the Japanese lexical reflexives (i.e. morphologically reflexive-marked) behave exactly as ix expected from the universal principle of Condition R (Lidz 2000, 2001). Second, more importantly, it will be pointed out that the Japanese syntactic reflexives (i.e. unmarked verb + reflexive) do not show the behaviors expected from Condition R. It will be argued that the unexpected behavior of the Japanese reflexive is due to the interaction of two types of focus structure: focus by intensifier and focus by construction. In Chapter 6, a construction hitherto classified as 'raising' will be examined.
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