Abstract
This paper modifies and extends Potts and Roeper’s (2006) analysis of what they call Expressive Small Clauses, simple uses of epithets such as You fool!, to analogous phrases in Japanese. The original Potts and Roeper analysis is unable to account for two puzzling characteristics of Japanese Expressive Small Clauses that are not shared with those in English: first, the use of a second person pronoun is not permitted in the Japanese counterparts, whereas many other forms of pronouns and non-pronominal nouns are available; second, something like “you fool” in Japanese can indeed occur as an argument of a sentence. Drawing on the recent syntactic literature on the morphological variation of the analogous nominal epithets, the paper proposes an account that explains the differences between English and Japanese Expressive Small Clauses.
This research was in part supported by Nanzan University Pache Research Subsidy 1-A-2 for the 2017 academic year.
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Notes
- 1.
To be accurate, P&R’s focus is on ESCs that are used as self-disapprobation, not on those used to insult others, but their analysis applies to other-directed ESCs as well.
- 2.
The status of no in ESCs is not obvious at all. It might be a genitive case particle, just like no in a possessive NP such as Taro no kuruma (“Taro’s car”). It might be inserted for some other reason independent from case assignment (such as Kitagawa and Ross’s (1982) Mod-Insertion rule). See (Watanabe 2010) and citations therein. The following discussion does not depend on the nature of no in an ESC. We will simply gloss it as no below.
- 3.
Since they are not “small clauses” in the usual sense, Julien and Corver drop the term ESC altogether—ESCs are “possessive predicational vocatives” in Julien’s terminology and “evaluative vocatives” in Corver’s. In this paper, we do not presume ESCs to be a class of vocative constructions, and so we stick to P&R’s terminology.
- 4.
See also (Bowers 1993) for the idea that predication in general is established by a functional head.
- 5.
A referential use of proper names can be derived using a type-shifting rule, which is needed anyway to derive a referential use of a bare common noun in Japanese (Izumi 2012).
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Izumi, Y., Hayashi, S. (2018). Expressive Small Clauses in Japanese. In: Arai, S., Kojima, K., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D., Satoh, K., Ohta, Y. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10838. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93794-6_13
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