Hajime Hoji

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Linguistics

April Draft of Chapter 9 ("Language Faculty Science and Physics" by Hoji and Plesniak) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022.

April 2022 Draft of Chapter 1 ("From Compatibility to Testability—Some historical background—" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being in 2022.

March 2024 Corrected Version of Chapter 4 ("The key tenets of language faculty science" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, De Gruyter Mouton (2023), edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo. (This used to be Chapter 3; due to change of the volume organization, it has been published as Chapter 4, inste...

March 2024 Corrected Version of Chapter 5 ("Detection of c-command effects" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, De Gruyter Mouton (2023), edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022. (This used to be Chapter 4; due to change of the volume organization, has been pub...

March 2024 Revised Version of Chapter 6 ("Replication: Predicted Correlations of Judgments in Japanese" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, De Gruyter Mouton (2023), edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo. (This used to be Chapter 5; due to change of the volume organization, it has been published as...

This is the first of the three lectures for those interested in language faculty science. The three lectures are intended for those who have no prior knowledge about language faculty science. The lectures will be available also at 51lfs.com.

The chapter provides a brief conceptual articulation of how we can study the language faculty itself by the basic scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from our hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in line with such predictions. The discussion starts out with challenges posed by the fact that t...

Abstract: The paper provides a brief conceptual articulation of how we can study the language faculty itself by the basic scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from our hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in line with such predictions. The discussion starts out with challenges posed by the fac...

The book demonstrates that it is possible to study the language faculty with the core scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in accordance with the predictions. In light of the "reproducibility crisis" as extensively addressed in recent years in a numbe...

April Draft of Chapter 10 ("Conclusion: Why Language Faculty Science?" by Hoji and Plesniak) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022.

Draft of Chapter 3 ("The key tenets of language faculty science" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022. Due to organizational change made to the volume, the chapter will be publ...

Draft of Chapter 4 ("Detection of c-command effects" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022. Due to organizational change made to the volume, the chapter will be published as Cha...

Draft of Chapter 5 ("Replication: Predicted Correlations of Judgments in Japanese" by Hoji) in The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science, under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022. Due to organizational change made to the volume, the ch...

PDF file of the presentation “Prediction, experiment and replication in language faculty science” at the 2020 Zoom Workshop on Language Faculty Science: Linguistic Intuitions and Replication (December 20, 2020). The presentation can be viewed at: ttps://youtu.be/Mf4AVN_9snc. This presentation, Daniel Plesniak's presentation "Replication across ind...

The Announcement: The 2020 Zoom Workshop on Language Faculty Science: Linguistic Intuitions and Replication December 20 and December 27 (Japan Time) Hoji's talk on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Mf4AVN_9snc Plesniak's talk on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9nn56RAr1PU

(Under contract with De Gruyter Mouton, to be edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo, with its planned publication being 2022.) This book is about the language faculty, which is hypothesized to underlie our ability to relate linguistic sounds/signs to meaning. It is also about scientific methodology, focusing on the language fa...

This is a slightly modified version of the handout posted at https://www.ninjal.ac.jp/event/specialists/colloquium/colloquium2018/ prior to my December 17, 2018 lectures (An Introduction to Language Faculty Science) at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. The actual handout used during the lectures was a shorter and simplified...

上山あゆみ、傍士元 (2017) 「容認可能性と言語理論の説明対象」, 『日本語文法』vol.17, No.2. pp.20-36. Ueyama, Ayumi & Hajime Hoji (2017) "Introspective Judgment and Pursuit of Rigorous Testability", _Journal of Japanese Grammar_, 17-2, 20-36. 内省に基づく研究では，しばしば最小対が用いられることもあって，文には容認されるものと容認されないものの２種類があるかのような印象が生まれやすい。しかし，現実には，文というものは，「(a) 必ず容認される文」「(b) 容認性がはっきりしない文」「(c) 決して容認されない文」の３つに...

Detection of the effects of LF c-command precisely in accordance with prior predictions means that it is possible to put hypotheses about the language faculty to a rigorous empirical test.

This is a response to Chomsky's (2017) "The Galilean Challenge," in On-Line Journal Inference (Vol. 3, No. 1). It's slightly modified version has appeared in August 2017 (Vol. 3, Issue. 2). This provides a brief preview of the book I have been working on. It is given as "Hoji, Hajime. (in preparation) Experiments in Language Faculty Science," but...

This is an e-edition of Hoji 2013 Gengo Kagaku-o Mezasite (Aiming at Linguistic Science): Issues on Anaphora in Japanese, edited by Ayumi Ueyama and Yukinori Takubo (Ohsumi Shoten, Japan). It contains the following seven previously published articles. Paper 1: Hoji, Hajime (1995) "Demonstrative Binding and Principle B," NELS 25, pp.255-271. Paper...

I think "From Compatibility-Seeking Research to Testability-Seeking Research" might be more informative a title. This is the Preface to the e-edition of 言語科学をめざして: Issues on anaphora in Japanese (2013), edited by Yukinori Takubo and Ayumi Ueyama. The following is taken from the blurb for the e-edition. "The Preface offers Hoji's own critical asse...

[This is taken from the back cover of the book.] This book explores how we can aspire to accumulate knowledge about the language faculty in line with Feynman’s ‘The test of all knowledge is experiment’. The two pillars of the proposed methodology for language faculty science are the internalist approach advocated by Chomsky and what Feynman calls t...

Once they have reached a certain maturational stage, every member of the human species is able to produce and comprehend the language to which s/he is exposed, barring any serious impairment. Underlying this ability of ours to relate linguistic sounds/signs (henceforth just "sounds" to make the exposition simpler) and meaning is the language facult...

[The last paragraph of Section 8.2] What I envisage is a time when we will be able to deduce definite and categorical predictions (predicted schematic asymmetries) in various languages, evaluate by experiments the validity of our universal and language-particular hypotheses, and formulate hypotheses of a successively more general nature, without lo...

言語科学をめざして：Issues on anaphora in Japanese 傍士 元 著／ 上山あゆみ・田窪行則 編

This talk, given on January 16, 2011, accompanies "Language Faculty Science as an Exact Science: Conceptual Justification," given on January 15, 2011, at Kyoto University.

This is a PDF file based on the PPT file used for my presentation at Kyoto University on January 15, 2011, which was a slightly modified version of the PPT file presented at Sophia University on 12/20/2010. Most of the changes subsequent to the Sophia presentation are in the "Notes" although a few new slides have been added. The "Notes" were provid...

This paper explores how the hypothetico-deductive method can be applied to research concerned with the properties of the language faculty. The paper first discusses how we can try to identify informant judgments that are likely a reflection of properties of the Computational System (or properties of the language faculty that are directly related to...

Handout for my presentation at Kyushu University on December 14, 2015. Slightly revised after the presentation. This is one of the two files mentioned in the first footnote of "Hoji2009revised.pdf" (A Foundation of Generative Grammar as an Empirical Science) available here at RG.

This is Hoji 2009 "A Foundations of Generative Grammar as an Empirical Science," mentioned in Hoji 2015. The second paragraph of the manuscript is copied here. Among the general theses that will be put forth and defended are: • The empirical justification for our hypotheses about the Computational System is whether and in what way they are link...

The paper ends as follows: "The essentials of the analysis outlined above are made in Kuroda 1979, where two types of passives are recognized in Japanese, the ni passive and the niyotte passive, and the former is explicitly argued in Kuroda 1979 to involve the argument-taking -rare. It is also clear that for Kuroda 1979 the agentive NP-ni is an ar...

Section 1: Introduction This paper is concerned with falsification and corroboration as crucial notions in assessing various theories and hypotheses in generative grammar.#1 The paper is an attempt to illustrate these notions by making concrete reference to the so-called scrambling construction in Japanese and two competing hypotheses, i.e., Ueyama...

In Ayumi Ueyama, ed., Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Reference and Anaphora—Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, Report of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Project No. 15320052, Supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 2006, Kyushu University, pp. 126-138. Other than Postscript...

The goal of this talk was: To defend the Major Object analysis, by showing that specific negative predictions made by this analysis are supported and that a negative prediction made by a raising analysis re. Proper Binding Condition (PBC) effects gets disconfirmed.

Abstract of the talk, with a slightly different title. Scrambling, PF and LF adjunction, and null operator movement in Japanese Hajime Hoji USC In Ross 1967 and in subsequent works, 'scrambling' is included among the stylistic rules, and that conception had not been seriously challenged (at least with respect to Japanese) (with a few exceptions suc...

Empirically, this talk is concerned with examples such as (1). (1) John-wa Mary-o Itariazin da to omotteita. John-TOP Mary-ACC Italian be that thought (2) a. John believed about Mary that she was Italian. b. John believed Mary to be Italian. I have the following three goals in mind. (3) a. To argue for and defend a Major Object analysis of the so-c...

Empirically, this talk is concerned with examples such as (1). (1) John-wa Mary-o Itariazin da to omotteita. John-TOP Mary-ACC Italian be that thought (2) a. John believed about Mary that she was Italian. b. John believed Mary to be Italian. I have the following three goals in mind. (3) a. To argue for and defend a Major Object analysis of the so-c...

5. Concluding Remarks We have endorsed the view, advocated by Gunji & Hasida (1998) and others, that the association between a 'floating' #-CL and its 'host NP' is not grammatically constrained. If we consider cases where BVA is at stake with a #-CL and its 'host NP' together serving as the intended 'binder', however, there seems to be a restrictio...

This paper aims to illustrate how we might proceed to attain repeatability and falsifiability in generative grammar, on the basis of discussion of concrete empirical materials in Japanese, such as bound variable anaphora, quantifier scope, and reconstruction effects. After critically examining and improving on the major empirical arguments for the...

[This is taken from "Downloadable papers" at my HP: http://www.gges.org/hoji/research/hp-papers.cgi .] "This paper is an attempt to articulate what was behind my 1998 LI paper on null objects in Japanese. If you are interested in issues in ellipsis (and would like to look at them from the perspectives of Japanese), I suggest that you read my 1998...

General Remarks: One of the major areas of research in generative grammar concerns the distribution and the interpretations of nominal expressions such as pronouns (it, him, them, etc.), and what grammatical (i.e., structural and lexical) knowledge underlies the relevant linguistic intuitions of the native speakers. When one tries to examine the va...

Chapter 2 of Formal Dependency and Organization of Grammar (2000) This is an improved version of Hoji 1990: Chapter Four: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese, under the "Hoji 1990" Project. This leads to Hoji 2003 "Falsifiability and repeatability in generative grammar: A case study of anaphora and scope dependency in Japanese," the 2011 Kyodai lec...

We examine the properties of Japanese stripping, hence of Japanese sluicing. We propose that the derivations and the representations of the CM- and the Non-CM-versions are radically different, with the crucial difference being that the former is ‘fully represented’ at LF by way of CR and IP Copying while the latter is not. Given the proposal, the p...

I demonstrate that the null object construction (NOC) in Japanese cannot be analyzed on a par with VP-ellipsis (VPE) in English, contrary to the suggestion made in Huang 1988, 1991 and Otani and Whitman 1991. I argue that what are considered to be “sloppy identity readings” in these works are not genuine sloppy identity readings, and I argue that s...

[This was circulated in 1998. A few non-substantive changes have been made subsequent to the circulation in 1998.]

This paper is concerned with the question of what formal relations Principle B is to restrict. There are two representative views on this. One regards the principle as regulating coindexation, a symmetrical relation, as in Chomsky (1981), or its modified versions such as Reinhart (1983: Ch. 7), where its application is in effect restricted to the c...

This paper argues (i) that Principle B is a condition on Formal Dependency, rather than on coindexation, (ii) there are two types of sloppy identity readings (SR1 and SR2) and only one of them (SR1) is based on Formal Dependency. Based on the distinction between SR1 and SR2, I propose that the so-called "interface between the Computational System a...

The main claim of the paper is that kare's inability to be construed as a bound variable is because of its deictic nature. The deictic nature of kare has been argued for based on (i) the close relationship between kare and the a paradigm, e.g., ano hito 'that person,' of the Japanese ko/so/a/do paradigms and (ii) the highly deictic nature of the a...

"Raising-to-Object, ECM and the Major Object in Japanese" Handout for the presentation at Japanese Syntax Workshop (U. of Rochester), 5/10-12/91. Two more handouts have been posted here from 2005. One is from the February 2005 presentation at Kyoto University and the other from the July 2005 presentation at LSA Workshop. The 2005 handouts address...

[Section 7: Conclusion] The main claim of the paper is that kare's inability to be construed as a bound variable is because of its deictic nature. The deictic nature of kare has been argued for based on (i) the close relationship between kare and the a paradigm, e.g., ano hito 'that person,' of the Japanese ko/so/a/do paradigms and (ii) the highly...

Chapter 1: Linguistic Theory and the Grammar of Japanese Chapter 2: Definite NP Anaphora and Japanese Phrase Structure Chapter 3: On the Nature of Condition D Chapter 4: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese Chapter 5: Sloppy Identity in Japanese Chapter 6: Coreference, Bound Variable Anaphora and Language Acquisition More information will be pr...

It has been suggested in Kang (1988, pp. 193-196) and Suh (1988, forthcoming) that the so-called Korean overt pronoun ku 'he' is able to function as a bound variable, contrary to the well-known observation that the so-called Japanese overt pronoun kare cannot be construed as a bound variable. In light of a great deal of similarities between Korean...

This is Chapter 1 of Hoji 1990 Theories of Anaphora and Aspects of Japanese Syntax, which contains: Chapter 1: Linguistic Theory and the Grammar of Japanese Chapter 2: Definite NP Anaphora and Japanese Phrase Structure Chapter 3: On the Nature of Condition D Chapter 4: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese Appendix to Chapter 4: Appendix to Chapte...

This is Chapter 2 of Hoji 1990 Theories of Anaphora and Aspects of Japanese Syntax, which contains: Chapter 1: Linguistic Theory and the Grammar of Japanese Chapter 2: Definite NP Anaphora and Japanese Phrase Structure Chapter 3: On the Nature of Condition D Chapter 4: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese Appendix to Chapter 4: Appendix to Chapt...

3.1. Introduction In this chapter, we will first consider the nature of condition D. Recall a conclusion in chapter 2 that the referential hierarchies relevant for condition D cannot be directly related to binding theoretic features. We will now observe a crucial difference between condition D and condition B. While the former can be suspended when...

The summary section of the chapter is reproduced here. ##### The purpose of this chapter is to consider whether the phenomenon of sloppy identity in Japanese provides confirming evidence for the Reinhartian view that condition B holds for bound variable anaphora (but not for coreference). ##### Given the standard assumption that the sloppy readi...

Appendix to Hoji 1990: Chapter Four: The so-called overt pronoun in Korean

This is Chapter 4 of Hoji 1990 Theories of Anaphora and Aspects of Japanese Syntax, which contains: Chapter 1: Linguistic Theory and the Grammar of Japanese Chapter 2: Definite NP Anaphora and Japanese Phrase Structure Chapter 3: On the Nature of Condition D Chapter 4: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese Appendix to Chapter 4: Appendix to Chapt...

This is Chapter 6 of Hoji 1990 Theories of Anaphora and Aspects of Japanese Syntax, which contains: Chapter 1: Linguistic Theory and the Grammar of Japanese Chapter 2: Definite NP Anaphora and Japanese Phrase Structure Chapter 3: On the Nature of Condition D Chapter 4: Bound Variable Anaphora in Japanese Appendix to Chapter 4: Appendix to Chapt...

Japanese and Korean are typographically quite similiar, so a linguistic phenomenon in one language often has a counterpart in the other. The papers in this volume are intended to further collective and collaborative research into both languages. The contributors discuss aspects of language acquisition, socio-linguistics, pragmatics, phonology, synt...

This is the handout for "Japanese Clefts and Reconstruction/Chain Binding Effects," presented at WCCFL6, held at University of Arizona (March, 1987). It proposes two distinct analyses for (i) CM-Cleft (where the "focus" has a case particle attached to it) and (ii) non-CM-Cleft (where the "focus" does not have a case particle attached to it), buildi...

[Summary of the paper] The initial hypothesis in this paper was that Japanese has an empty pronominal (Kuroda, 1965), which can occur in argument positions, including the object position (contra Huang (1984) and Hasegawa (1986)), within the S. The hypothesis has been supported by variable binding tests in Hoji (1985) and Hoji and Saito (in preparat...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1985. [The following remarks are taken from the 1985 thesis.] This study deals with the phenomena of variable binding and quantifier and wh-phrase interpretation in Japanese. The general theoretical framework that is adopted here is the Government and Binding theory of Chomsky (1981).It is argued that the...

We have argued that if we adopt an account of weak crossover that utilizes the notion antecedent-of, the weak crossover facts in Japanese can be accounted for under some independently motivated assumptions. In particular, under this approach, the absence of the weak crossover effect in (8b) ceases to be a problem for the hypothesis that scrambling...