Japanese Subordinate Clauses without a Head: The Non-occurrence of DO, SAY, and THINK

Abstract

This paper addresses special kinds of Japanese subordinate clauses which lack an explicit head predicate but are similar in interpretation to clauses headed by a suspensive form of suru ‘do’, iu ‘say’, or omou ‘think’. I discuss that these unheaded constructions are subject to certain syntactic and semantic constraints that do not apply to their headed counterparts, and develop a formal analysis within the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, aiming to model these constraints without postulating a covert element in the place of the missing predicate.