2003 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Semantics and Syntax of Japanese Formal Nouns
| Project/Area Number |
13610671
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
言語学・音声学
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| Research Institution | Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University |
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Principal Investigator |
SASAGURI Junko Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University, Faculty of Humanities, Lecturer, 人文学部, 講師 (40333249)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
TAKUBO Yukinori Kyoto University, Graduate School of Letters, Professor, 大学院・文学研究科, 教授 (10154957)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2003
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| Keywords | formal noun / definiteness of noun / (set of) properties / grammaticalization / mapping / modal auxiliary / interface between lexical properties and syntax / ECM construction |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this project is to show that the basic usages of formal nouns are derived by the correlation between their lexical properties and syntactic positions. As case studies, we have examined the formal noun phrases tokoro -da and N-no koto as shown below.
a) The properties of tokoro-da conditionals are the function of the lexical property of tokoro and that of the copula, as applied to the conditional domain. The tokoro-da conditionals denotes : The present situation is the unique world identifiable by the property 'if p, then q'. For this to hold, the present situation must be {W : not p and not q}. The tokoro-da conditional, thus, stresses the existence of a causal chain of p leading to q, thereby creating the pragmatic effect of stressing that the value of p is crucially important for the consequent q.
b) we have examined the properties of obligatory and optional uses of no koto, observing that the optional no koto is restricted to direct object position, while obligatory no koto can appear in other positions. We have shown that we can account for the subject/object asymmetry of optional no koto. We proposed that N in N-no kotoop must be referential and N-no koto is a generalized quantifier constructed compositionally from N, no, koto. Our analysis to treat N-no koto as a generalized quantifier can account for all the properties of optional and obligatory no koto, reducing the differences between them to the selectional properties of the predicates taking them as complement. As a conclusion we have proposed a way to derive how the optional no koto effectively functions as an extensionalizing operator.
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