Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order

333 Pages·2012·5.28 MB·English

by  Shigeru Miyagawa

Case, argument structure, and word order
Routledge Leading Linguists
EDITED BY CARLOS P. OTERO, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
1 Partitions and Atoms of Clause 10 Theoretical Comparative Syntax
Structure Studies in Macroparameters
Subjects, Agreement, Case Naoki Fukui
and Clitics
Dominique Sportiche 11 A Uni(cid:191) cation of Morphology
and Syntax
2 The Syntax of Speci(cid:191) ers and Investigations into Romance and
Heads Albanian Dialects
Collected Essays of M. Rita Manzini and Leonardo M.
Hilda J. Koopman Savoia
Hilda J. Koopman
12 Aspects of the Syntax of
3 Con(cid:191) gurations of Sentential Agreement
Complementation Cedric Boeckx
Perspectives from Romance
Languages 13 Structures and Strategies
Johan Rooryck Adriana Belletti
4 Essays in Syntactic Theory 14 Between Syntax and Semantics
Samuel David Epstein C.-T. James Huang
5 Comparative Syntax and 15 Regimes of Derivation in Syntax
Language Acquisition and Morphology
Luigi Rizzi Edwin Williams
6 Minimalist Investigations in 16 Typological Studies
Linguistic Theory Word Order and Relative Clauses
Howard Lasnik Guglielmo Cinque

7 Derivations 17 Case, argument structure, and
Exploring the Dynamics of Syntax word order
Juan Uriagereka Shigeru Miyagawa
8 Towards an Elegant Syntax
Michael Brody
9 Generative Grammar
Theory and its History
Robert Freidin
Case, argument structure,
and word order
Shigeru Miyagawa

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First published 2012
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© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Shigeru Miyagawa to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Case, argument structure, and word order / Shigeru Miyagawa.
p. cm. — (Routledge leading linguists; 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Case. 2. Grammar,
Comparative and general—Syntax. 3. Grammar, Comparative and
general—Word order. I. Title.
P240.6.M59 2011
415—dc23
2011035160
ISBN13: 978-0-415-87859-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-12684-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.
To my parents
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Numeral quantifi ers and thematic relations 17
2 Telicity, stranded numeral quantifi ers, and quantifi er scope 44
3 Argument structure and ditransitive verbs in Japanese 64
WITH TAKAE TSUJIOKA
4 Nominalization and argument structure: Evidence for the
dual-base analysis of ditransitive constructions in Japanese 92
Appendix to Chapter 4: Challenges to the dual-base
analysis of ditransitives 112
5 Genitive subjects in Altaic and specifi cation of phases 122
6 The genitive of dependent tense in Japanese and
its correlation with the genitive of negation in Slavic 146
7 Blocking and Japanese causatives 169

8 Blocking and causatives revisited: Unexpected competition
across derivations 195
9 Historical development of the accusative case marker 217
10 The Old Japanese accusative revisited: Realizing all the
universal options 259
Notes 275
References 301
Index 319
Introduction
According to a UNESCO report (Bjeljac-Babic 2000), there are some 6,000
spoken languages in the world. Anyone who has worked in the fi eld in Africa,
Italy, South Asia, or many other parts of the world may rightly feel that this
is an underestimation. Whatever the actual number, the variations we can
witness are enormous, and this diversity is something to celebrate.1 A part
of our work as linguists is to delve deeply into the workings of a particular
language in order to try to come to an understanding of its internal logic. At
the same time, as linguists working in the generative tradition, we want to
know what these languages have in common, for the basic tenet that guides
our work is that each language exemplifi es a general structure employed by
all human languages (Chomsky 1975, 77). The combination of looking deeply
into a particular language and at the same time keeping the universality of
human language in mind naturally leads to a way to do our work that is both
interesting and illuminating. When studying a language, we tend to focus
on some element that is unusual about that language, and we take it up as
a challenge to try to fi gure out how the chosen element works. We see this
pattern repeated over and over in linguistics research, with studies of such
phenomena as the unusual transitive expletive construction in Icelandic, the
mysterious auxiliary selection in Romance, and the extraordinary agreement
system in Bantu. It is quite a feat simply to elucidate how, for example, the
Bantu agreement system works, and one can devote a lifetime to such a task

without coming even close to a full understanding of the system at work.
These unusual features of a particular language are inherently interesting
because they represent the diversity of human language, how languages can
vary, and vary greatly. At the same time, as we learn the inner workings of
these unusual facets of a particular language, we begin to explore how they
tap the resource of the general linguistic structure, thereby illuminating what
the underlying universal system holds. In this way, the unique properties of a
particular language do not comprise what are essential only to that language,
which would isolate the language from the rest, but rather, they demonstrate
the possibilities of the general system at work, thereby uniting the language
under study with the untold others that are spoken around the world.
In this book, I have assembled fi ve topics that I have worked on over the
past thirty years, topics that center primarily on Japanese but with reference
2 Case, argument structure, and word order
also to a variety of other languages. Each topic comprises something unusual
that is found in Japanese, although by no mean limited to Japanese, and the
topics all relate in varying degrees to issues of case, argument structure, and
word order. Each topic is presented as a pairing of an “earlier” published
work and a new work that extends the earlier work, including responses to
other linguists’ criticisms of the original analysis. I have “earlier” in quota-
tions because, while some of the previously published chapters date back to
the 1980s, others are quite new, as in the case of Chapter 5 on nominative–
genitive conversion, which is in fact a 2011 article (but is based on work
done much earlier). In writing the new chapters, I made it a point to sum-
marize parts of the original work suffi ciently, sometimes quite substantially,
in order for the analysis in the new work to make sense.
STRANDING OF NUMERAL QUANTIFIERS AS EVIDENCE
FOR A-MOVEMENT, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO
THE PREDICATE-INTERNAL SUBJECT POSITION
Chapters 1 and 2 take up the topic of numeral quantifi ers. A numeral quan-
tifi er (NQ) is composed of a numeral and a classifi er that agrees with the
type of entity being counted. NQs are found in many languages in Asia and,
although there is variation in when they must appear, in Japanese, they are
inevitably required when counting people, animals, or objects. While a NQ
typically occurs adjacent to its associate noun phrase, as in (1), a striking
property of NQs is that they can also occur away from their NP, as in (2).
(1) Kodomo-ga futa-ri hasitta.
child-nom two-cl ran
person
‘Two children ran.’
(2) Hon-o kodomo-ga ni-satu yonda.
book-acc child-nom two-cl read
bound volume
‘The child read two books.’ (Lit. ‘Books, the child read two.’)

It is not the case that the NQ can occur anywhere relative to its associate NP.
While the object-oriented NQ ni-satu in (2) above can occur away from the
object NP, being separated from it by the subject, a subject-oriented NQ usually
cannot be separated from the subject by the object (Haig 1980; Kuroda 1980).
(3) *Gakusei-ga sake-o san-nin nonda.
student-nom sake-acc three-cl drank
person
‘Three students drank sake.’
In Chapter 1, which is an abridged version of the second chapter of my
1989 book, Structure and case marking in Japanese, I present my original
work on this topic, where I proposed that the NQ and its associate NP must
Introduction 3
observe strict locality. Where a NQ stands alone, as in (2) above, there is an
unpronounced copy of the moved associated NP next to it that fulfi lls the
requirement of strict locality. I further showed that based on this approach
to NQs, we can fi nd evidence for A-movement, in that NQs can be stranded
precisely where we expect to fi nd a copy of A-movement in passive and
unaccusative constructions.
Chapter 2, which is new work, takes up a number of counterexamples
that have appeared in the literature as challenges to the strict-locality pro-
posal. Virtually all of these counterexamples take the form of a subject-ori-
ented NQ separated from the subject NP with unexpected grammaticality.
What I demonstrate, extending the work in Miyagawa and Arikawa 2007,
is that these counterexamples are actually predictable under an important
development that occurred in linguistic theory, namely, the hypothesis of the
predicate-internal subject position. This is another A-position that hosts a
copy of A-movement. The puzzle then becomes, why is (3) above still judged
ungrammatical? Kuroda gave this example in an era when we did not have
the predicate-internal subject position in the theory, so its ungrammaticality
was expected. But given the modern theory, we expect the NQ in (3) to meet
the strict-locality requirement with the copy of the subject in the predicate-
internal subject position. What I argue in Chapter 2 is that the copy of the
subject in the predicate-internal subject position in Japanese is only visible
under a particular aspectual interpretation, specifi cally, telic aspect. While (3)
above is interpreted as atelic, so that the copy in the predicate-internal subject
position is not visible and the example is ungrammatical, the following, which
diff ers minimally from (3) by the addition of ‘already’, naturally invites a telic
interpretation, and the sentence becomes perfectly acceptable.
(4) Gakusei-ga sake-o sudeni san-nin nonda.
student-nom sake-acc already three-cl drank
‘Three students already drank sake.’
In this example, the copy of the subject is visible next to the NQ, thereby
fulfi lling the locality requirement; the object has scrambled to a position

above this predicate-internal subject position. Although evidence for the
predicate-internal subject position has been given using quantifi er fl oat in
English and French (Sportiche 1988), that analysis has been challenged
(see, for example, Bošković 2004). The analysis of NQ stranding I present
in Chapter 2 provides evidence for what has come to be one of the center-
piece notions in recent linguistic theory.
DITRANSITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS AND
ARGUMENT STRUCTURES
Chapters 3 and 4 take up the topic of argument structure and ditransitive
verbs. Scrambling, which is a defi ning property of Japanese, has played a