In Japanese, there are two kinds of nani-mo: a quantifier nani-mo and a reactive attitudinal nani-mo. Although both types of nani-mo are negative polarity items (NPIs), the reactive attitudinal nani-mo has distinctive properties that the quantifier nani-mo (and typical NPIs) do not have. The reactive attitudinal nani-mo is non-propositional and usually appears with a negative modal. I argue that the meaning of the reactive attitudinal nani-mo conventionally implies that the speaker considers that the given proposition p, which is salient in the discourse, is extreme and unnecessary, and they object to p in a weak manner (i.e., not totally objecting to p). I then argue that the polarity sensitivity and occurrence with a modal in the case of the reactive attitudinal nani-mo are explained based on its lexical meaning and the general pragmatic constraint of attitude matching. It is generally assumed that NPIs are licensed by negation or downward-entailing operators (e.g., Ladusaw 1980) and non-veridical operators (e.g., Giannakidou 1998) at the level of syntax and logical structure. This paper shows that there is a new kind of NPI, a “reactive attitudinal NPI,” that is not licensed by logical operators but, rather, requires a negative element due to its pragmatic function of objection.

This paper discusses the usage of the topic-comment articulation of a sentence in Japanese cooking show discourse and argues that the description of the usage requires both information- and discourse-structural considerations. The analysis addresses two functions of topics: presenting cooking instructions as parallel procedures and connecting non-task-oriented utterances to the mainstream instructions. While the latter is observed in both TV and YouTube cooking show discourse, the YouTube discourse rarely uses the former and presents instructions more linearly, contrary to observations in other sub-registers of cooking discourse (Aoyama 1987; Moriya 1993; Shimojo 2019; Kaneyasu and Kuhara 2020). This study argues that the observed variations correlate with differences in discourse presentation rooted in different priorities: recipe clarity for the TV discourse and simplicity/brevity for YouTube. The discourse observations are also discussed in Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005) for grammatical descriptions of the usage of topics.

This paper discusses the function of Verb-Subject order in the narrative of Tunis Arabic. When the VS clause appears in the foreground discourse and its subject is a character, it causes shift of scene by setting a central character of the scene, its place, and its time. The paper demonstrates how this VS clause functions by examining the actual narrative sample. This function of scene shifting is connected with the basic function of VS clause, which thetically presents new information in the context. On the basis of this view, this paper clarifies the functional difference of the VS clause, SV clause, and V clause in the foreground discourse of the narrative. Further discussion is made in terms of information structure. This paper argues that scene shifting VS clause has two functions—that of Common Ground content, which conveys the information of the narrative’s content, and Common Ground management, which is concerned with narration itself. This framework explains exceptional shifts of scene without the VS clause.

This study investigated at what point in a sentence native Japanese speakers begin to build long-distance dependencies while reading English relative clauses (RCs) by conducting two self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that Japanese learners of English construct long-distance dependency immediately after reading a verb by demonstrating “plausibility mismatch effects” at the verb site. On the contrary, Experiment 2 did not find evidence that they form a long-distance dependency before a verb, that is, no “transitivity mismatch effect.” On the basis of these results, this study proposes that Japanese learners of English initiate long-distance dependency formation immediately after encountering a verb, but it does not precede the appearance of a verb. This extends previous findings that it is difficult to generate predictions in the processing of non-native languages, to a structural processing level.

Recent work on imperatives has explored what enables sentences to convey the directive meaning. The “minimal” theories assume an imperative-oriented pragmatic content (e.g., Portner 2004, 2007, von Fintel and Iatridou 2017, among others), which does the heavy lifting that is required to convey the meaning. The “modal” theories, in contrast, assume that it is a semantic modal that derives the diverse interpretations of imperatives (e.g., Han 2000, Kaufmann 2012, Condoravdi and Lauer 2012, 2017, among others). This paper addresses this controversy and proposes a division of labor between the contributions of semantic and pragmatic meanings of imperatives, focusing on the two different types of imperatives in Japanese. I conclude that the process by which the directive meaning is generated differs depending on the components that each type encodes. The resulting account eliminates the competition between the minimal and modal theories, by synthesizing the underlying ideas behind them. It also sheds light on the different ways in which sentence ‘forms’ interact with sentence ‘types’ and contexts to modify the illocutionary force of an utterance.

This paper proposes an analysis of two exclusive focus particles in Japanese: dake and sika. Our starting point is the idea, originally due to Kuno (1999a), that the meanings of dake and sika have two components. For dake, the prejacent (i.e. the positive statement without the focus particle) is the ‘primary assertion’ and the exclusive meaning is the ‘secondary assertion’ whereas the primary/secondary status of these meanings is exactly opposite for sika. While Kuno’s proposal is intuitively appealing, the formal statuses of the notions of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ assertions have not been clarified in past literature. The goal of this paper is to offer a principled theoretical explanation for this distinction, and thereby contribute to the literature on the meanings of exclusive focus particles. Specifically, we formulate a formal analysis by building on Tomioka’s (2015) analysis of dake in terms of the maximality operator and by identifying the secondary assertion as a particular type of derived entailment (in the sense of Kubota (2012)) that is triggered by the maximality operator. The proposed analysis represents a new synthesis of the ‘symmetricist’ and ‘asymmetricist’ analyses of exclusive focus particles, with implications for the debate on the typology of ‘non-at-issue’ entailments within current formal semantics literature.

This paper investigates the typological correlation between negation marking and focus marking based on the ‘Bantu Morphosyntactic Variation Database’ (Marten et al. 2018) compiling linguistic data obtained through 142 parameters to capture morphosyntactic microvariation in Bantu languages. Based on the inter-parametric analysis on the correlation between four parameters related to main clause negation marking and one parameter related to morphological focus marking, two typologically significant correlation are established: 1) languages with a postverbal strategy for main clause negation highly tend to have a morphological focus marker, and 2) languages lacking a morphological means of focus marking tend to adopt the preinitial strategy for main clause negation. These two tendencies can be explained from three perspectives, namely, 1) focus as inherent nature of (pragmatic) negation and the incompatibility of preinitial negation with an additional morphological focus marker, 2) the grammaticalisation path from a locative as a focus marking element to postverbal negation particle, and 3) ‘focus contrast’ as a structural requirement in the postverbal negative particle constructions.

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.

As in the sentence Zatsu-ni kami-o akaku someta (I dyed my hair red roughly.), the manner adverb zatsu-ni (roughly) and the resultative predicate akaku (red) can co-occur in a sentence. However, the reversed word order of zatsu-ni and akaku, *Akaku zatsu-ni kami-o someta, becomes ungrammatical. Close examination of the data suggests that when a manner adverb and a resultative predicate co-occur, the syntactic anti-c-command condition given in (i) must be observed.

(i) Anti-c-command condition:

The manner adverb must not be c-commanded by the resultative predicate.

The present study conducted a linguistic survey to 48 Japanese native speakers in order to clarify the occurrence conditions of a tense form RU with kara-clause verb in so-called Causal Construction of Blaming (hereafter CCB, RU kara, ~noda) and the generative mechanism of its negative nuance. First, the result of the subjects’ grammatical judgement to the causal sentences with three variable factors, 1) clarity of the object blamed, 2) generality of causal relation, and 3) volitionality of kara-clause verb showed that they are important in this order to be judged grammatical. Next, the native speakers’ intensity judgement of the negative nuance depending on tense and subject demonstrated that RU-RU was the strongest, RU-TA the second, and TA-TA the weakest when kara-clause and main clause share the same subject, whereas RU-TA and TA-TA were equally strong unless sharing the same subject. The last main clause completion test result indicated that negative contents tend to be written in main clause more frequently with RU in kara-clause than with TA. Based on these results, this study concludes that the negative nuance of CCB can be created by the emphasis of cause, equivalent to responsibility, kara-clause information being1) focalized and/or 2) foregrounded by sentence-final noda and/or selection of RU form respectively as well as Tamura’s (2013) pragmatic conditions and semantics.