The Japanese Adjectival Conjugational Ending Drop Construction:From a Syntax-Semantics Interface Perspective

Abstract

This paper deals with the Japanese adjectival conjugational ending drop construction (abbreviated as “ACED”), exemplified by utterances such as Dasaʔ! (“Uncool!”) and Kimochiwaruʔ! (“Disgusting!”). (The symbol “ʔ” represents a glottal stop in the examples.) Providing a thorough description of the syntax and semantics of the ACED construction, I argue that the construction contains certain systematic form-meaning correspondences. The ACED construction is peculiar both syntactically and semantically. Syntactically, it lacks the basic clausal functional categories C, T, and Neg and consists solely of an optional subject NP and an adjectival base followed by a glottal stop. It is therefore characterized as a “root small clause” in the sense of Progovac (2006). On the functional side, the ACED construction “expresses” (as opposed to “communicates”) the speaker’s immediate reaction to a given situation in which he/she is involved at the time of utterance and is used exclusively to perform what Hirose (1995, 1997) calls a “private (as opposed to ‘public’) expression act,” one that does not have any communicative intention on the part of the speaker. These observations are related naturally from a syntax-semantics interface standpoint in terms of motivation, iconicity, and markedness.