[Lingtyp] Inquiry on Japanese grammar

[Jianming Wu]

Dear typologists,

      The following two questions on Japanese grammar are from a graduate
stuent in my department. I am wondering if you may offer some help for
him.  Many thanks!


Best


Jianming Wu


Institute of Linguisitcs,

Shanghai International Studies University



" Hello! I am a graduate student at SISU. I have some questions about
Japanese linguistic facts as I couldn’t find relevant literature. I will
truly appreciate it if any typologists would kindly answer them as below or
point me to the relevant literature:



1.       Relative clauses (RC) in Japanese can do without RC markers. This
has been testified by all the examples I have seen in the Japanese RC
literature. For instance:



[*RC*aniki-ga         katte-ki-ta __]            ringo

brother-NOM buy-come-PAST gap  apple

“The apple that the brother bought.”



However, a Japanese native informant told me that it does not sound natural
to omit the RC marker (な/na/) before the head noun. Therefore, I wonder if
the inconsistency is due to the stylistic difference between the spoken and
the written language.



2.       According to Kamio (1977) and Ishizuka (2008), demonstratives
(Dem) can either precede or follow RCs in Japanese. See below:



(1)     *Sono* [aniki-ga         katte-ki-ta__]              ringo
        (Kamio,
1977)

that brother-NOM buy-come-PAST gap   apple

“That apple which the brother bought.”

(2)     [minna-ga            __  sagasi-teiru]   *sono* ronbun

everyone-NOM gap  look-for-ASP that paper

“That paper which everyone is looking for.”



Leaving aside the functional differences, I wonder if there is any biased
usage of either configuration (Dem-RC or RC-Dem). In a study published in a
Chinese journal (*Japanese Learning and Research*), Sheng (2010: 86-94) has
found a significant Dem post-positioning bias in RCs in a Japanese corpus
study. In fact, only 6 instances of Dem-RC configuration were found.
However, the corpus is based on Japanese novels. I have talked to 2
participants after the experiment and they admitted that either
configuration (Dem-RC or RC-Dem) was equally acceptable to them. So I
wonder if the post-positioning bias reported in Sheng (2010) is also due to
the stylistic difference. I have been trying to locate corpus studies based
on the spoken Japanese that bear on this question, but I couldn’t find any
relevant literature in English or Chinese.



Thanks a lot!
Lv Jun"
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