We present the results of two acceptability judgment and three self-paced reading experiments exp... more We present the results of two acceptability judgment and three self-paced reading experiments exploring the source of degradation effects on the acceptability of genitive subjects caused by having them not adjacent to the verb. From a syntactic perspective, Miyagawa (2011) attributes this adjacency constraint to his assumption that the genitive subject is situated in Spec-vP, lower than adverbials adjoined to vP or higher. This theory thus predicts that adverbials lower than vP can intervene between the genitive subject and the verb without degrading acceptability. To test this issue and examine the time course of the intervention effects, our experiments varied the number and the types of interveners. Whereas the results of our acceptability judgment experiments straightforwardly confirmed the purported intervention effects, the self-paced reading experiments provided results that cannot be explained in structural terms alone. First, the reading times of the verb and/or the head no...
This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materi... more This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materi-als consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrie-val-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials.
This paper deals with a seldom studied object/oblique alternation phenomenon in Japanese, which. ... more This paper deals with a seldom studied object/oblique alternation phenomenon in Japanese, which. We call this the bump alternation. This phenomenon, first discussed by Sadanobu (1990), is similar to the English with/against alternation. For example, compare hit the wall with the bat [=immobile-as-direct-object frame] to hit the bat against the wall [=mobile-as-direct-object frame]). However, in the Japanese version, the case frame remains constant. Although we fundamentally question Sadanobu’s acceptability judgment, we also claim that the causation type (i.e., whether the event is an instance of onset or extended causation; Talmy, 1988; 2000) could make an improvement. An extended causative interpretation could improve the acceptability of the otherwise awkward immobile-as-direct-object frame. We examined this claim through a rating study, and the results showed an interaction between the Causation type (extended/onset) and the Object type (mobile/immobile) in the direction we pred...
Note that a phrase headed by -te (teP) is usually an adjunct floating around in a sentence (like ... more Note that a phrase headed by -te (teP) is usually an adjunct floating around in a sentence (like English gerunds); however, when V-te is adjacent to a verb from a certain set of verbs, they jointly form a single complex predicate. The status of a [V-te V] string as a complex predicate (rather than two separate predicates) is clear when the semantics of V2 is significantly lightened, but even if the lightening effect is not very clear, its status as a single predicate can be verified through various linguistic tests including a Negative Polarity Item test (NPI test), as discussed in previous studies (Matsumoto 1996; McCawley and Momoi 1986; Miyagawa 1987). Below are some examples illustrating this point. As seen in (3), teP can be adjoined to a sentence-initial position; in such a case, the teP is an adjunct and thus an NPI in the teP cannot be licensed by NEG attached to the matrix predicate, as shown in (4).
The present paper examines the semantic properties of a type of Japanese verbal complex, the V-te... more The present paper examines the semantic properties of a type of Japanese verbal complex, the V-te V predicate, and argues that a non-derivational approach to the semantics of the V-te V predicate is inadequate both descriptively and explanatorily. A generative theory that derives the semantics of the V-te V predicate from its parts is explored under the framework of the generative lexicon (GL) theory. The complex predicate formation is characterized as a process of collapsing two or more qualia structures into a single one, a process in which at least three operations and one well-formedness condition on semantic representations are involved.
We present the results of two acceptability judgment and three self-paced reading experiments exp... more We present the results of two acceptability judgment and three self-paced reading experiments exploring the source of degradation effects on the acceptability of genitive subjects caused by having them not adjacent to the verb. From a syntactic perspective, Miyagawa (2011) attributes this adjacency constraint to his assumption that the genitive subject is situated in Spec-vP, lower than adverbials adjoined to vP or higher. This theory thus predicts that adverbials lower than vP can intervene between the genitive subject and the verb without degrading acceptability. To test this issue and examine the time course of the intervention effects, our experiments varied the number and the types of interveners. Whereas the results of our acceptability judgment experiments straightforwardly confirmed the purported intervention effects, the self-paced reading experiments provided results that cannot be explained in structural terms alone. First, the reading times of the verb and/or the head no...
This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materi... more This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materi-als consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrie-val-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials.
This paper deals with a seldom studied object/oblique alternation phenomenon in Japanese, which. ... more This paper deals with a seldom studied object/oblique alternation phenomenon in Japanese, which. We call this the bump alternation. This phenomenon, first discussed by Sadanobu (1990), is similar to the English with/against alternation. For example, compare hit the wall with the bat [=immobile-as-direct-object frame] to hit the bat against the wall [=mobile-as-direct-object frame]). However, in the Japanese version, the case frame remains constant. Although we fundamentally question Sadanobu’s acceptability judgment, we also claim that the causation type (i.e., whether the event is an instance of onset or extended causation; Talmy, 1988; 2000) could make an improvement. An extended causative interpretation could improve the acceptability of the otherwise awkward immobile-as-direct-object frame. We examined this claim through a rating study, and the results showed an interaction between the Causation type (extended/onset) and the Object type (mobile/immobile) in the direction we pred...
Note that a phrase headed by -te (teP) is usually an adjunct floating around in a sentence (like ... more Note that a phrase headed by -te (teP) is usually an adjunct floating around in a sentence (like English gerunds); however, when V-te is adjacent to a verb from a certain set of verbs, they jointly form a single complex predicate. The status of a [V-te V] string as a complex predicate (rather than two separate predicates) is clear when the semantics of V2 is significantly lightened, but even if the lightening effect is not very clear, its status as a single predicate can be verified through various linguistic tests including a Negative Polarity Item test (NPI test), as discussed in previous studies (Matsumoto 1996; McCawley and Momoi 1986; Miyagawa 1987). Below are some examples illustrating this point. As seen in (3), teP can be adjoined to a sentence-initial position; in such a case, the teP is an adjunct and thus an NPI in the teP cannot be licensed by NEG attached to the matrix predicate, as shown in (4).
The present paper examines the semantic properties of a type of Japanese verbal complex, the V-te... more The present paper examines the semantic properties of a type of Japanese verbal complex, the V-te V predicate, and argues that a non-derivational approach to the semantics of the V-te V predicate is inadequate both descriptively and explanatorily. A generative theory that derives the semantics of the V-te V predicate from its parts is explored under the framework of the generative lexicon (GL) theory. The complex predicate formation is characterized as a process of collapsing two or more qualia structures into a single one, a process in which at least three operations and one well-formedness condition on semantic representations are involved.
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Papers by Kentaro Nakatani