Yoshiki Ogawa

Tohoku University | Tohokudai · Graduate School of Information Sciences

The objective of this article is twofold: First, we compare the modal be going to-VP construction in English with the qu-VP 'go-VP', VP-qu 'VP-go', and qu-VP-qu 'go-VP-go' constructions in Chinese and propose that neither qu 'go' nor lai 'come' in Chinese has been grammaticalized to a modal auxiliary, as has occurred in the be going to construction...

理論言語学が自然言語の統語・意味・形態・音韻の基本的な性質を明らかにしてきた今、言語学者の関心の主軸は、言語間のミクロな変異や同一言語の漸進的な変化の記述と、その原因の探求へと移り始めており、生物学者も、生物進化と言語変化の相同性に着目し始めている。本書は、30人の研究者が、最新の言語理論とコーパスや統計などのツールを使って、言語の変化・変異・獲得・進化の様相の記述と本質の探究を目指す論文集である。

This article demonstrates that Japanese minimizers, which are originally used as Negative Polarity Items in a negative context, can sometimes behave as focus markers when used postnominally. I will review a previous syntactic analysis of English minimizers, and propose a revised syntactic analysis of Japanese minimizers, based on newly discovered s...

In this article, I argue for the existence of a complex predicate containing negation in the form of [[V-Neg]-V]. If Neg is a functional category, this will falsify the prohibition against syntactic verb incorporation that picks up a functional head to reach a lexical head, or the Principle of Lexical Integrity, which in effect prohibits merger of...

We will propose that the Complex Negative Adjectives (CNAs) in Japanese are now undergoing lexicalization, and that lexicalization by ga-drop begins in relative clauses and can extend to the matrix clause for the following reasons: (a) the Nominative-Case-licensing requires non-defective Tense, (b) Tense can be defective in Japanese relative clause...

This article argues that sequential voicing (SV), which was traditionally regarded as an exclusively morphophonological phenomenon that takes place in compounds, is also available in some syntactic phrases headed by formal nouns (FNP) and that the asymmetry between the FNPs and lexical noun phrases in terms of the possibility of SV is attributed to...

There are two types of "need" in English: "need" as a lexical verb and "need" as a modal auxiliary, the latter being used only in interrogation and negation. Just like the two types of "have" in English, the auxiliary use of "need" is arguably a result of grammaticalization from the lexical counterpart. This article argues for the grammaticalizatio...

This is a review of the book, 『レキシコンの現代理論とその応用』(Modern Theories of Lexicon and Their Applications), published from Kurosio Publishers in 2019. This review is to be published in the next volume of『英文学研究』 to be published in April 2022.

Japanese has a number of measure phrase (MP) constructions and the variation has been increased diachronically compared with 1000 years ago. This article reviews synchronic analyses of measure constructions in Japanese and other languages (Jackendoff 1977, Corver 2009, Watanabe 2011, 2013) and proposes a new analysis that can also cover the diachro...

In Japanese, coordination or juxtaposition of verbs or adjectives semantically antonymous to each other can form a NP. We argue that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer in each conjunct and that the younger speakers are more likely to accept the new construction because it has been gradually developing. Abstract: In Japanese,...

The Ogawa Corpus contains diary data collected by the generative linguist Yoshiki Ogawa. The release of this set of data is part of the many research activities driven by the Research Unit on Language Change and Language Variation, led by Yoshiki Ogawa. (See: http://ling.human.is.tohoku.ac.jp/change/) He has collected utterances by (i) his first-b...

A co-authored book on grammatlicalization, lexicalizartion and constructionalizaiton, published from Kaitakusha, Japan. The three authors are from generative syntax, cognitive linguistics and Japanese linguistics, respectively, and they review the progress of one or more of these research topics in their respective areas in the last decade(s) and p...

This is a collection of 20 articles by 24 authors. Please refer to the following URL for details: http://www.kaitakusha.co.jp/book/book.php?c=2276

The noun "hazu" in Japanese, which was originally a common noun around up to 300 years ago, has been grammaticalized to a modal noun in combination with a copula "da" (= be), and it is now in the process of being further grammaticalized to a modal auxiliary in combination with a negative adjective "nai" (= not), which is de-nominalizing "hazu." If...

This is an English-to-Japanese translation (by 14 Japanese linguists) of Joan Bybee's (2015) Book titled "Language Change," published from Cambridge University Press. Please refer to the following URL for details: http://www.kaitakusha.co.jp/book/book.php?c=2272

This paper argues that a verbal/adjectival phrases can be nominalized either by a nominal complementizer or by a nominalizer external to the VP/AP, and that this syntactic property can change diachronically in a single language, due to grammaticalization of formal nouns or constructionalization from compounds to clauses. To defend this hypothesis,...

This paper argues that a verbal/adjectival phrases can be nominalized either by a nominal complementizer or by a nominalizer external to the VP/AP, and that this syntactic property can change diachronically in a single language, due to grammaticalization of formal nouns or constructionalization from compounds to clauses. To defend this hypothesis,...

Den Dikken (2006) proposes that a nominal copula is obligatorily realized when a predicate inversion takes place in a noun phrase. Applying this hypothesis to Japanese, I have argued that in this language there are two types of measure noun constructions, one of which lack a nominal copula and the other of which obligatorily realized the nominal co...

In Japanese, Nominative Case on a subject in an adnominal clause can alternate with Genitive Case under limited syntactic and semantic conditions, a fact called Nominative/Genitive Conversion (NGC). An article written about 45 years ago that the range of possible environments for NGC was narrowing and identified two different idiolects distinguishe...

Nominative/Genitive Conversion in Japanese has been decreasing its frequency and becoming more and more "stativized" in Japanese in the last 100 years. This paper argues how and why such a syntactic change occurs in the framework of micro parametric syntax. Above all, we argue in this paper we will first present a corpus result showing that the a G...

We hypothesize that in Japanese, a relative clause whose subject is in the Genitive Case (simply, GSC) is diachronically shrinking from CP to TP to vP to VP/AP, meaning that the younger age groups will have a smaller syntactic structure for a GSC.In this presentation, this hypothesis is endorsed from a large-scale web-based survey showing that ther...

In Japanese, Nominative Case on a subject in an adnominal clause can alternate with Genitive Case under limited syntactic and semantic conditions, a fact called "Nominative/Genitive Conversion" (NGC). Harada (1971) showed that the range of possible environments for NGC was narrowing and identified two different idiolects distinguished only in terms...

Harada (1971) argued some forty five years ago that the Japanese phenomenon called ``Nominative/Genitive Conversion'' (NGC) was undergoing a syntactic change, which was detected as idiolectal variations. Synchronically, Miyagawa (2011) argues that the NGC is not a free alternation but that more stative predicates are more likely to accept a Genitiv...

More than one diachronic corpus has shown that the Nominative-Genitive Conversion (NGC) in Japanese, which might appear to be a free alternation in adnominal clauses, has declined its frequency in the last 100 years or so (Nambu, 2014; Ogawa, 2016). Harada (1971, 1976) also identified two dialects roughly corresponding to two different age groups a...

A collection of 24 articles by 27 authors, edited by three researchers including me. See below for more details and the table of content.

This is the handout of the presentation we made at the 151st conference of The Linguistic Society of Japan. In this presentation, we first showed a peculiar property of the Genitive subject occurring in the complement of the formal noun "hazu" (which originally meant "an arrow", but has grammaticalized to a formal noun with the modal meaning of "ou...

Japanese V-V compounds have two structures of head-head and complement-head, and both types show atransitivity, where the internal argument(s) of a transitive or ditransitive verb are not realized. There are two independent reasons for atransitivity. One is the clause structure where the internal argument is not licensed by a verb but by a function...

In English, there are a couple of words whose categorial status is murky, the most notable of which is near. It is sometimes referred to as a preposition (Svenonius (2010)), as a transitive adjective (Maling (1983)), or as an intransitive adjective whose PP complement happens to be filled by an empty P (Kayne (2005)). The first aim of this article...

As for the morphosyntactic size of a compound, it has occasionally been suggested that some of the N-N compounds can be larger than derived words but are smaller than phrases (Allen (1978), Giegerich (2005)) or that some of the V-V compound are words, while others are phrases (Kageyama (1993, 2001), Nishiyama (1998)). However, exactly how large eac...

The emission verbs are used to express ‘non-voluntary emission of stimuli that impinges on the senses’ (Perlmutter (1978: 163)). There has been controversy over the question of whether their intransitive counterparts are unergative verbs or unaccusative verbs. Reinhart (2002) claims that they are thematically indistinguishable from unaccusative cha...

In this paper, we propose a novel analysis of the sentences with transitive aspectual verbs in Japanese as well as in English. We first propose that the transitive aspectual verbs are in fact functional categories which are located in a functional head, following Cinque (2006) and Fukuda (2007). Then, we will show that the sentences with the transi...

This is the handout of the presentation made at the 141th conference of The Linguistic Society of Japan. The purpose of the presentation is to show a peculiar property of the Japanese motion verbs "agaru (go up)" and "ageru (raise)" as the V2 of V-V compounds. The peculiar property has ben analyzed essentially in line with Nishiyama and Ogawa's (20...

This presentation aims for defending the following three hypotheses: Proposal 1: Certain instances of the Japanese verbs dasu ‘let out’ and deru ‘go out’ that occur as the V2 of V-V compounds are semi-lexical motion verbs. (def: Semi-lexical motion verbs are lexical categories merged as functional heads. (Cardinalletti and Giusti (2001))) Proposal...

A review of "Zubizarreta and Oh (2007) On the Syntactic Composition of Manner and Motion (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 48)", published on Studies in English Literature 50, pp.242-253 (the annual journal of The English Literary Society of Japan) in 2009.

In this article, focusing on the dative alternation with the Give Verbs and Verbs of Future Having, we propose (i) that the V-NP-PP construction and the double object construction (DOC) share the same underlying structure, which involves a small clause CP headed by the invisible verb HAVE, which is an amalgamation of the invisible copula BE and the...

The Subject Raising (SR) in Japanese is an A-movement across a CP-boundary. It remains unclear why such a movement is possible without violating the Phase Impenetrability Condition. To answer this question, it is proposed in this article that the head of the embedded CP in the SR construction undergoes incorporation to the selecting V. It is argued...

In Japanese root clauses, most verbs must be paired with the morpheme -tei to form a complex predicate in order to denote a present state. However, in certain subordinate clauses including the relative clause, the presuppositional clause of a cleft sentence, and the comparative clause, this restriction is exempted. Semantic restrictions are also im...

Syntactically speaking, it has long been known that noun phrases are parallel to clauses in many respects. While most syntactic theories incorporate this principle, nouns have generally been regarded as inferior to verbs in terms of their licensing abilities, and nominal projections have been regarded as less complex than verbal projections in term...

Syntactically speaking, it has long been known that noun phrases are parallel to clauses in many respects. While most syntactic theories incorporate this principle, nouns have generally been regarded as inferior to verbs in terms of their licensing abilities, and nominal projections have been regarded as less complex than verbal projections in term...

The stage-level/individual-level distinction. which has so far been limited to verbal and adjectival predicates, should be extended to (underived) nominal predicates as well. Specifically, while simple nominals are individual-level predicates, event nominals and inalienable possession nominals are stage-level predicates. The currently prevailing di...

Given Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), SOV languages are classified into overt object shift languages. On the basis of this classification, this paper first proposes the following generalization: object-oriented floating quantifiers, multiple object construction, multiple subject construction, scrambling, and extraction from within...