Abstract
While Nominal Clauses in Japanese are similar to English nominalization in their argument-taking ability, they are unlike English in that they behave just like verbal clauses in the distribution of verbal Cases on the noun's arguments. In investigating the Nominal Clauses with deverbal nouns serving as their predicates, this paper will demonstrate that a set of licensing conditions must be imposed on the deverbal nouns: they need to satisfy categorial, argument-structural, and semantic requirements. I will propose, however, that these conditions are necessary but not sufficient in licensing a well-formed Nominal Clause, and that a further restriction must be added on the basis of prosodic evidence: I will claim that the deverbal noun must consist of at least four morae. This prosodic constraint provides further support for Poser's (1990) contention regarding the role of the bimoraic foot in Japanese.
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I would like to thank Clancy Clements, Stuart Davis, Masayo Iida, Beth Levin, Shigeru Miyagawa, Mineharu Nakayama, Ljiljana Progovac, and Yoshiko Uchida for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The current version benefited greatly from the insightful comments and challenging questions of three anonymous NLLT reviewers. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Indiana University, University of Rochester, and the 1991 annual meeting of the LSA in Chicago, and I am indebted to the people in attendance for their comments and discussions.
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Tsujimura, N. Licensing nominal clauses: The case of deverbal nominals in Japanese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 10, 477–522 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133371
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133371