Abstract
Direct attributive uses of adjectives have often been considered a characteristic property of adjectives. Recent studies suggest, however, that some languages lack direct modification by adjectives entirely and that they only allow for indirect modification using relative clauses. At first glance, Japanese seems to fit into the group of languages that lack direct adjectival modification, and this is in fact a widely accepted view on Japanese adjectival modification. This paper presents evidence for noun modifiers without the support of finite TP and CP in Japanese, using scopal behavior of degree quantifiers as a probe into the modification structure. Japanese adjectival modifiers do not show the scope island effect for degree quantifiers that is expected under the view that they are finite relative clauses. If our analysis is on the right track, there is no need for a stipulation in the grammar of Japanese to block adjectives from forming direct modifiers.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aihara, Masahiko. 2007. Japanese superlative constructions: Evidence for ‘est’-movement. In Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 37), vol. 1, ed. Emily Elfner, and Martin Walkow, 87–100. Amherst: GLSA, University of Massachusetts.
Aihara, Masahiko. 2009. The scope of –est: Evidence from Japanese. Natural Language Semantics 17: 341–367.
Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Adjective syntax and noun raising: Word order asymmetries in the DP as the result of adjective distribution. Studia Linguistica 55: 217–248.
Baker, Mark C. 2003. Lexical categories: Verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beck, Sigrid, Toshiko Oda, and Koji Sugisaki. 2004. Parametric variation in the semantics of comparison: Japanese vs English. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 13: 289–344.
Belikova, Alyona. 2008. Syntactically challenged rather than reduced: Participial relatives revisited. In Proceedings of the 2008 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 1–15.
Bhatt, Rajesh. 2006. Covert modality in non-finite contexts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Bhatt, Rajesh, and Shoichi Takahashi. 2011. Reduced and unreduced phrasal comparatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29: 581–620.
Bowers, John. 1969. Surface structure interpretation in English superlatives. Master’s Thesis, MIT.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The syntax of adjectives: A comparative study. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Clancy, Patricia. 1985. The acquisition of Japanese. In The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, vol. 1, ed. Dan I. Slobin, 373–524. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dixon, R.M.W. 1982. Where have all the adjectives gone?. Berlin: Mouton.
Farkas, Donka F., and Katalin E. Kiss. 2000. On the comparative and absolute reading of superlatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 417–455.
Frank, Paul. 1990. Ika syntax. Arlington, TX: SIL and University of Texas, Arlington.
Heim, Irene. 1985. Notes on comparatives and related matters. Master’s Thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
Heim, Irene. 1999. Notes on superlatives. Master’s Thesis, MIT.
Heim, Irene. 2001. Degree operators and scope. In Audiatur Vox Sapientiae: A festschrift for Arnim von Stechow, ed. Caroline Féry, and Wolfgang Sternefeld, 214–239. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Howard, Edwin. 2008. Superlatives, NPIs and Strawson-entailment. Honours Thesis, McGill University.
Huang, C.-T. James. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Jacobs, Roderick A., and Peter S. Rosenbaum. 1968. English Transformational Grammar. Waltham, Mass.: Ginn.
Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kennedy, Christopher. 2007. Modes of comparison. In Proceedings of CLS 43, ed. Malcolm Elliott, James Kirby, Osamu Sawada, Eleni Staraki, and Suwon Yoon. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Kim, Min-Joo. 2002a. Does Korean have adjectives? MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 43, ed. T. Ionin et al., 71–89. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Kim, Min-Joo. 2002b. The absence of adjectives and noun modification in Korean. In Proceedings of the 2002 international conference on Korean Linguistics. Seoul: Hankwuk Mwunhwasa.
Kuno, Susumu. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kusumoto, Kiyomi. 1999. Tense in embedded contexts. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Kusumoto, Kiyomi. 2002. The semantics of the non-past -ta in Japanese. In Proceedings of the third formal approaches to Japanese linguistics, 163–180. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 41. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Larson, Richard. 1999. Semantics of adjectival modification. Lecture notes. Amsterdam: LOT Winter School.
Larson, Richard, and Naoko Takahashi. 2007. Order and interpretation in prenominal relative clauses. In Proceedings of the second workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, ed. M. Kelepir and B. Öztürk, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 54. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Larson, Richard, and Hiroko Yamakido. 2008. Ezafe and the deep position of nominal modifiers. In Adjectives and adverbs: Syntax, semantics, and discourse, ed. L. McNally, and C. Kennedy, 43–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lasnik, Howard, and Mamoru Saito. 1992. Move: conditions on its application and output. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lyu, H.-Y. 2004. Focus and superlative center in Korean. Presentation handout for LIN 393: Seminar on Noun Phrase Modification, University of Texas at Austin.
Makino, Seiichi, and Michio Tsutsui. 1986. A dictionary of Japanese grammar. Tokyo: Japan Times.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 1984. Lexical categories in Japanese. Lingua 73: 29–51.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2008. Genitive subjects in Altaic. In Proceedings of the workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics 4, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 56. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Murasugi, Keiko. 1991. Noun phrases in Japanese and English: A study in syntax, learnability and acquisition. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Nishiyama, Kunio. 1999. Adjectives and the copulas in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 8: 183–222.
Nishiyama, Kunio. 2005. Morphological boundaries of Japanese adjectives: Reply to Namai. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 134–142.
Ogihara, Toshiyuki. 2004. Adjectival relatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 557–608.
Paul, Waltraud. 2005. Adjectival modification in Mandarin Chinese and related issues. Linguistics 43: 757–793.
Rice, Keren. 1989. A grammar of slave. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Richards, Norvin. 2008. Wh-questions. In The Oxford handbook of Japanese linguistics, ed. Shigeru Miyagawa, and Mamoru Saito, 348–371. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, J.R. 1964. A partial grammar of English superlatives. MA thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Ross, J.R. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Sharvit, Yael, and Penka Stateva. 2002. Superlative expressions, context, and focus. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 453–504.
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1978. Nihongo no bunseki [Analysis of Japanese]. Tokyo: Taishukan.
Shimoyama, Junko. 2008. Indeterminate pronouns. In The Oxford handbook of Japanese linguistics, ed. Shigeru Miyagawa, and Mamoru Saito, 372–393. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shimoyama, Junko. 2011. Degree quantification and the size of noun modifiers. In Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 18, ed. William McClure, and Marcel den Dikken, 356–367. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Shimoyama, Junko. 2012. Reassessing crosslinguistic variation in clausal comparatives. Natural Language Semantics 20: 83–113.
Smith, Carlota S. 1961. A class of complex modifiers in English. Language 37: 342–365.
Smith, Carlota S. 1964. Determiners and relative clauses in a generative grammar of English. Language 40: 37–52. (Reprinted in Modern Studies in English, ed. D.A. Reibel and S.A. Schane, 1969), 247–263. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.)
Sproat, Richard, and Chilin Shih. 1991. The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. In Interdisciplinary approaches to language: Essays in honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, ed. C. Georgopoulos and R. Ishihara, 565–593. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sudo, Yasutada. 2009. Invisible degree nominals in Japanese clausal comparatives. In Proceedings of the 5th workshop on Altaic formal linguistics, ed. Reiko Vermeulen and Ryosuke Shibagaki. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Szabolcsi, Anna. 1986. Comparative superlatives. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 8, ed. Naoki Fukui et al., 245–265. Cambridge, Mass.: MITWPL.
Szabolcsi, Anna. 1994. The noun phrase. In Syntax and semantics, vol. 27: The syntactic structure of Hungarian, ed. Ferenc Kiefer and Katalin É. Kiss, 179–274. San Diego: Academic Press.
Teodorescu, Alexandra. 2006. Adjective ordering restrictions revisited. In Proceedings of the 25th west coast conference on formal linguistics, ed. Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, 399–407. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Urushibara, Saeko. 1993. Syntactic categories and extended projections in Japanese. Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University.
Vander Klok, Jozina. 2009a. Direct adjectival modification in Javanese. In Proceedings of the sixteenth meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 16), ed. Sandy Chung, Daniel Finer, Ileana Paul, and Eric Potsdam, 211–225. http://westernlinguistics.ca/afla/meetings/afla16/proceedings.htm.
Vander Klok, Jozina. 2009b. Indirect modification in Javanese: Evidence from attributive comparatives. In Proceedings of the 45th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS 45), 625–639. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Vander Klok, Jozina. To appear. On the nature of adjectival modification: A case study in Javanese. In Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 40), GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Whitman, John. 1981. The internal structure of NP in verb final languages. In Proceedings of the 17th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 17), 411–418. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1945. Grammatical categories. Language 21: 1–11.
Yamakido, Hiroko. 2005. The nature of adjectival inflection in Japanese. Ph.D. dissertation, Stony Brook University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shimoyama, J. The size of noun modifiers and degree quantifier movement. J East Asian Linguist 23, 307–331 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9121-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9121-y