The left periphery of Japanese exclamatives*

要旨

Abstract. In this paper, I intend to shed light on the fact that Japanese exclamatives, unlike their English counterparts, may not be embedded under factive verbs but instead may be embedded under a set of assertive predicates such as say and think (first observed in Ono 2006 ). I argue that this contrast is attributed to the interrogative and declarative syntax that English and Japanese exclamatives have, respectively. In order to account for the selection of predicates that may embed Japanese exclamatives, I further argue for a cartographic approach based on Rizzi’s (1997) and Haegeman’s (2006) left periphery structures and following Ono (2006) , namely that Japanese exclamatives always contain MoodP, which allows only a subset of assertive matrix predicates to embed exclamatives given its position above TopicP and FocusP in the hierarchy. Another observation made in the paper is that the subject DP in Japanese exclamatives is obligatorily either aboutness topicalized or exhaustive listing focalized.

主題