Japanese Modals at the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface

要旨

This chapter narrows down the scope of modality studies in Japanese and focuses on how Japanese modal predicates are syntactically represented within the framework of generative grammar. While various modal expressions in Japanese are discussed throughout the volume, how such linguistic items should be analysed in syntactic structures is not taken up as a main topic in any other chapter. In order to fill in this gap, this chapter presents some of the recently proposed syntactic analyses concerning Japanese modal predicates and discusses where in the syntax Japanese modality can be represented. In particular, we look at so-called ‘person restrictions’ on the subjects of modal (and modal-related) predicates in Japanese, which will lead us to discuss further theoretical implications in the spirit of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995, 2001 and others). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

主題