2021 年 Supplement.1 巻 p. 69-115
In conventional theories of syntax and morphology, linguistic expressions have been sorted into grammatical ones that conform to structural constraints and ungrammatical ones that do not so conform. However, the existence of peculiar expressions that, in spite of violating structural constraints, are nevertheless acceptable in a given language has been frequently observed. Based on a wide variety of such “exceptional” phenomena from diverse languages including external argument compounds in Japanese, peculiar passives in English, impersonal reflexives in Spanish, absolute reflexive affixes in Russian, and the aoi me o site iru ‘blue-eyed’ construction in Japanese, this paper demonstrates that these seemingly unrelated phenomena actually hold a semantic characteristic in common, namely the expression of a general, unvarying property attributable to the subject or topic of a sentence. In short, conventional structural constraints that are motivated for sentences of “event predications” — sentences describing particular events or states that unfold along the axis of time — are found to be inapplicable to sentences of “property predications” describing the more-or-less permanent characteristics of a subject or topic. Even though they violate structural constraints, property predication sentences are nonetheless acceptable. From this it becomes clear that event predication and property predication form the two core elements of semantic function in human language, and that each depends on structural constraints distinct from the other. Furthermore, from the observation that when event predication sentences are transformed into property predication sentences they undergo intransitivization or impersonalization, thereby losing transitivity, the mechanism of “event argument suppression” is proposed to capture this interrelation between syntax and semantics.
