This paper is mainly concerned with a new analysis of Japanese and English modal auxiliaries in terms of the concept of ‘expressivity, ’ i.e. the ‘subjectivity’ or ‘objectivity’ of a given expression, and with the discovering of a common principle which underlies the syntactic behaviors of the auxiliaries in the two languages. It is the following points which I mainly discuss in order to support my analysis:(a) classifying Japanese and English auxiliaries into two types, namely, ‘subjective auxiliaries’ and ‘objective auxiliaries’ from the viewpoint of ‘expressivity’ and semantic structure;(b) proving that ‘subjective auxiliaries’ are under five syntactic and semantic constraints concerning
negation, tense, question, sentential subordination and
sentential pronominalization;(c) proposing a universal ‘deep structure’ to explain the above constraints naturally by applying Ross's ‘performative analysis.’ Finally I suggest that ‘expressivity’ should be incorporated into general linguistic theory.
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