[Lingtyp] Inquiry on Japanese grammar

[TSUKIDA, Naomi]

Dear Jianming Wu and Hartmut Haberland,

I am a native speaker of Japanese. 

On the first point: 

I think there was some kind of mis-communication between your student 
and the Japanese native informant he/she consulted. /na/ is necessary 
only for a certain kind of adjectives which is called keiyou-dousi in 
Japanese, an example of which was cited in Haberland's response. 

> 静かな町 vs. 町は静かだ。

On the second point: 

> 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.

I completely agree to the 2 participants. It is possible that there is a 
stylistic　difference, but I am sorry that I am not aware of any 
literature on the topic.

One thing I can say is that Dem-RC word order may cause ambiguity, but 
RC-Dem order does not. 
In the (1) sentence, 

> (1)     Sono [aniki-ga         katte-ki-ta__]              ringo       
      (Kamio, 1977)
> 
> that brother-NOM buy-come-PAST gap   apple
> “That apple which the brother bought.”

the demonstrative sono may be interpreted to modify aniki which directly 
follows it. 
Thus, in written texts, such word order tends to be avoided by conscious 
writers, whereas in conversation, where the intonation may help to 
reduce the ambiguity, such word order may be observed.

I wish everyone a happy new year!

月田　尚美
TSUKIDA, Naomi

Faculty of Foreign Studies
Aichi Prefectural University



 
----- Original Message -----
送信者: "Hartmut Haberland" <hartmut at ruc.dk>
送信日時: 2014年12月28日(日) 21:31:45

> I am not an expert on Japanese grammar and have none whatsoever native 
intuitions, and furthermore, some people will object to my analysis 
because it doesn’t conform to certain models of grammar, but in my 
understanding there are no RCs in Japanese but only pre-modifyers in an 
NP, most of which are clauses consisting of, or ending in, a predicate (
historically, these predicates had different endings from sentence-final 
predicates). Now from this point of view there is no real difference 
between what would be translated into a RC in English and a pre-
modifying adjective (this similarity is strengthened by the fact that 
adjectives are inflected for tense in Japanese). On the other hands, 
certain expressions require な to form a predicate (like 静か ‘quiet'), 
and this な has sometimes (e.g. by Bloch) been analyzed as an allomorph 
of the copula. It is thus not a RC marker, but a predicate-builder. One 
could also say, that the copula is the only verb where there still is a 
difference between rentaikei and shuushikei:
> 静かな町 vs. 町は静かだ。
> 
> The second question concerns the order of pre-modifiers, where 
obviously a constraint that demonstratives have to be the first pre-
modifier  before any clausal modifier has been liftet. I cannot say 
anything about that.
> 
> Happy New Year,
> Hartmut Haberland
> ________________________________
> Fra: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] på vegne af 
Jianming Wu [wu.jianming2011 at gmail.com]
> Sendt: 28. december 2014 12:59
> Til: Jean-Christophe Verstraete
> Cc: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Emne: [Lingtyp] Inquiry on Japanese grammar
> 
> 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:
> 
> 
> [RCaniki-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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