Against Finite Raising (and Against Defective Tense): A Semantic Analysis of -yooni naru in Japanese

Abstract

The change of state verb naru behaves like a raising verb when it takes a yooni-marked complement clause. The syntactic status of the subject argument in this construction has been controversial in the literature. While some authors (e.g. Shibatani 1978) have argued that the -yooni naru construction takes an expletive subject, Uchibori (2000) and Fujii (2006) analyze it as a case of what they call ‘finite raising’, in which the embedded subject syntactically raises to the matrix clause. According to Uchibori and Fujii, such an analysis is supported by the fact that the embedded tense in the -yooni naru construction is ‘defective’, since only the nonpast tense form can appear in the complement clause. In this paper, we reconsider the syntactic and semantic properties of the -yooni naru construction, and show that the finite raising analysis lacks any strong support either empirically or conceptually. Empirically, syntactic tests such as NPI licensing and indirect passive point to the conclusion that an alternative, non-raising analysis is better. Conceptually, the distribution of the tense morpheme in the embedded clause, the key evidence for its alleged ‘defective’ status (and hence for the finite raising analysis), receives independent explanation from the lexical semantic properties of -yooni naru as a change of state predicate involving a habitual (or homogeneous) meaning component. Our conclusion is in line with the recent reconsideration of ‘finite control’ in Japanese by Akuzawa and Kubota (2020) and Kubota and Akuzawa (2020) in that a careful semantic analysis simplifies the syntactic properties of certain ‘infinitive-like’ constructions in Japanese with overt tense marking.