Abstract
Japanese exhibits the Multiple Nominative Construction (MNC), where more than one nominative-marked NP appear within a single clause. Though the MNC has been extensively investigated in the syntax literature, its relation to rightward-displacement constructions has hardly been discussed. In the present article, we provide new sets of MNC data relating to the three types of right-displacement constructions: relatives, clefts, and postposing. The generalisation is that for the linearly ordered nominative-marked NPs in an MNC string, only the leftmost NP may be right-displaced (that is, relativised, clefted, postposed). This pattern is shown to follow as an outcome of modelling incremental parsing, without stipulations specifically made for the observed data. We propose an account of MNCs in the light of an incremental grammar, formalising it within Dynamic Syntax. In this account, an MNC sentence is parsed on a word-by-word basis, and its interpretation is gradually built up, modelled as the growth of a semantic structure. In cases where a right-displacement is permitted, the right-displaced NP is successfully parsed against the structure built by the preceding part of the sentence. In cases where a right-displacement is disallowed, the right-displaced NP cannot be properly processed because the preceding part of the sentence has created no structural position into which the content of the right-displaced NP is reflected. As theoretical implications of the proposed account, we suggest the concept of time-linear grammaticality.
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Notes
Japanese examples are notated in the Hepburn system, except that the long vowels are transcribed as ā for /a:/, ē for /e:/, ī for /i:/, ō for /o:/, and ū for /u:/. For glossing purposes, we adopt Leipzig Glossing Rules except for fp ‘final particle,’ hrsy ‘hearsay evidential,’ and nmls ‘nominaliser.’
The parser could have assumed that Ken-ga is a thematic subject (rather than a major subject) and run the actions encoded in the thematic subject marker -ga. In this case, the subject node is decorated with Ken', and there will be no structural position for the second NP imōto. As a result, this derivation path will not be pursued further.
As we address only the genitive-type of MNCs (see Sect. 2.1), NP2 in the sense of (11) always introduces a metavariable. In addition to relational nouns, other types of metavariable-introducing nouns include part–whole nouns such as yane ‘roof of x’ and inalienable nouns such as te ‘hand of x,’ where ‘x’ is modelled as a metavariable in our account.
NP1 could be a metavariable-introducing noun, as in imōto ‘the younger sister of x’ in example (i) below. But the metavariable introduced by NP1 is contextually updated, as in ‘my younger sister.’ This update occurs in the corresponding relative construction (ii), too. In our account, imōto creates the term (ι, y, sister'(U)(y)), where U is a metavariable and replaced with the concrete term speaker', as in (ι, y, sister'(speaker')(y)). The resulting term denotes the unique y such that y is the younger sister of the speaker.
(i)
Imōto-ga
kami-ga
kireida.
sister-nom
hair-nom
beautiful
‘My younger sister’s hair is beautiful.’
(ii)
[e
kami-ga
kireina]
Imōto
[
hair-nom
beautiful]
sister
‘My younger sister, whose hair is beautiful’ < relative >
In the standard DS formalism (Cann et al., 2005), actions for an unfixed node cannot be applied if the current node is specified for content and type, as in (92). Noting that postposing typically occurs colloquially, Seraku and Ohtani (2016: 208) hold that such constraints are relaxed in a colloquial register; see Kempson et al., (2002: 24) for a similar analysis.
Seraku and Ohtani (2016) demonstrate that the postposed item may be parsed on a Linked node; see also Chatzikyriakidis’s (2017) Link account of afterthoughts in Greek. Even if the postposed item in (97)–(98) is parsed on a Linked node, it cannot be incorporated in the propositional structure because the initially parsed item sono tooko ‘that man’ does not introduce a relevant metavariable.
To this end, the parser needs to run Generalised Adjunction to introduce a globally unfixed type-t-requiring node before parsing sono otoko ‘that man,’ ensuring that the structure built by the parse of Sono otoko-ga kami-ga nagai ‘that man’s hair is long’ is embedded under the higher structure. Note that this does not preclude a uniform analysis of (105) and (107): one could use Generalised Adjunction for (105) too, and the tree in (106) still emerges.
A growing body of work has recently been conducted to model DS action sequences in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) (Sato 2011); see also, e.g., Eshghi et al. (2015) and Gregoromichelaki et al., (2020a, 2020b). In a DAG, multiple options are available at any point, and some of them will crash if they end up with inability to process further. The DAG representation seems to be a promising tool for formalising our treatment of time-linear grammaticality. I thank an anonymous referee for directing my attention to this point.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, questions, and suggestions. Parts of this article were read at Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris 2015 (Université Paris Diderot, 9/10/15), the 30th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (Kyung Hee University, 29/10/16), and the 31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (University of the Philippines, 16/11/17). I sincerely thank the audiences for their constructive feedback. I also wish to express my gratitude to Koji Kamada, Mika Kizu, and Akira Ohtani for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. All errors are solely my own.
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Appendix
Appendix
This Appendix explicates some formal details of representational and procedural aspects of Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al., 2005; Kempson et al., 2001).
Let us start with the representational aspects of the framework. In the text, each node is decorated with an informal notation of a content–type pair such as Ken': e. Formally, each node is decorated with a set of statements concerning semantic content, its logical type, and so on. For instance, the ‘content’ statement is expressed with a formula predicate Fo, as in Fo(Ken'), and the ‘type’ statement is expressed with a type predicate Ty, as in Ty(e). Node addresses are defined in the Logic of Finite Trees (LOFT; Blackburn & Meyer-Viol, 1994). The root node is designated as Tn(0), with a tree-node predicate Tn. Given an arbitrary node position Tn(α), its argument daughter is Tn(α0), and its functor daughter is Tn(α1). To illustrate, the tree in (57) is more formally displayed as in (109).
LOFT also enables us to refer to any nodes from the perspective of the current node. For instance, < ↓0 > (X) means that X holds at the argument daughter of the current node, and < ↓1 > (X) means that X holds at the functor daughter of the current node. Thus, in (109), from the perspective of the current node, marked with the pointer ♢, the statements such as < ↓0 > (Fo(Ken')) and < ↓1 > (Ty(e → t)) hold.
Let us turn to the procedural aspects. As stated in Sect. 3, a tree is gradually built up through the combination of computational, lexical, and pragmatic actions. Each action is formulated in the form of ‘IF…, THEN…, ELSE…’ The IF-line specifies a condition on the application of the action in question. If this condition is met at the current node, the parser looks at the THEN-line; otherwise, it looks at the ELSE-line. The THEN-line and the ELSE-line may specify a sequence of primitive actions: building a node (make(α)), moving the pointer ♢ (go(α)), decorating a node (put(α)), and so forth. For instance, Ken and ne- ‘sleep’ are assigned the following lexical entries:
Not only lexical actions but also computational and pragmatic actions are defined in the same format. For instance, the computational action of Elimination is formulated as in (112) (Howes & Gibson, 2021: 268).
For a full introduction to the formalism, the reader is referred to Kempson et al. (2001). See also Kempson et al. (2016), Howes and Gibson (2021), and references therein for recent advances in the framework.
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Seraku, T. An Incremental Grammar Approach to Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese. J of Log Lang and Inf 32, 297–331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-022-09368-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-022-09368-9