Pseudocategorical or purely thetic?
A contrastive case study of how thetic statements are expressed in Japanese, English, and German
According to Marty (1918), thetic statements differ
from categorical ones in making a simple existential recognition or rejection rather than a predication. In Japanese,
where two subject particles, ga and wa, are presumably available for this
differentiation (Kuroda 1972), the point can be expounded especially by the
fact that da ‘to be’ hardly appears as an existential verb in ga-marked, but only in
wa-marked sentences. Moreover, the same holds true for German optatives. I conclude from these
observations that thetic statements find their expression not only pseudocategorically, as originally assumed by Marty (1918), but also in a purely thetic manner in natural languages, provided
(at least) there is no personal deictic agreement at work between a syntactic subject and a syntactic predicate.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.“Categorical,” “thetic,” and “pseudocategorical” after Marty
(1918)
- 2.1Categorical statements
- 2.2Thetic statements
- 2.3Pseudocategorical sentences
- 3.
Ga-sentences and SA-sentences as expressions of thetic statements
- 3.1
Ga- as opposed to wa-sentences in Japanese
- 3.2SA- vs. non-SA-sentences in English and German
- 4.Where does pure theticity come from?
- 5.Optative – A purely thetic expression in German
- 6.Concluding remarks
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
References
References
Abraham, Werner
2018 Valenzdiversifikationen:
Was ist Thetikvalenz? In
Valenz und Dependenz: Theorie
und Praxis. Festschrift für Professor Ulrich Engel zum 90. Geburtstag,
Andrzej Kątny (ed.), 69–90. Gdańsk: Institut für Germanistik der Universität Gdańsk.
Chomsky, Noam
1982 Some
Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Deguchi, Masanori
2012 Revisiting
the Thetic/Categorical distinction in Japanese.
Poznań Studies in Contemporary
Linguistics 48(2): 223–237.
Diesing, Molly
1992 Indefinites. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Frey, Werner
2006 How
to Get an Object-es into the German
Prefield. In
Form, Structure, and Grammar: A Festschrift
Presented to Günther Grewendorf on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,
Patrick Brandt &
Eric Fuß (eds), 159–185. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Fujinawa, Yasuhiro
2017 Licht
und Schatten der kategorischen/thetischen Aussage: Kopula und Lokalisierungsverben im deutsch-japanischen
Vergleich. In
Grammatische Funktionen aus Sicht der
japanischen and deutschen Grammatik [
Linguistische Berichte, Sonderhefte
24],
Shin Tanaka,
Elisabeth Leiss,
Werner Abraham &
Yasuhiro Fujinawa (eds), 15–40. Hamburg: Buske.
Fujinawa, Yasuhiro
2020 Kategorik
und Thetik als Basis für Sprachvergleiche – dargestellt am Beispiel einer kontrastiven Linguistik des Deutschen
und des Japanischen. In
Zur Architektur von Thetik und
Grammatik: Deutsch, Japanisch, Chinesisch und Norwegisch,
Werner Abraham,
Elisabeth Leiss &
Shin Tanaka (eds), 169–242. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Geist, Ljudmila
2006 Die
Kopula und ihre Komplemente: Zur Kompositionalität in
Kopulasätzen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Grewendorf, Günther
2002 Minimalistische
Syntax. Tübingen: Francke.
Haberland, Hartmut
2006 Thetic-Categorical
distinction. In
Encyclopedia of Language &
Linguistics, 2nd edn,
Keith Brown,
Anne H. Anderson,
Laurie Bauer,
Margie Berns,
Graeme Hirst &
Jim Miller (eds), 676–677. Oxford: Elsevier.
Haider, Hubert
2010 The
Syntax of
German. Cambridge: CUP.
Höhle, Tilman N.
2018[1992] Über
Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In
Beiträge zur deutschen
Grammatik: Gesammelte Schriften von Tilman N. Höhle,
Stefan Müller,
Marga Reis &
Frank Richter (eds), 381–416. Berlin: Language Science Press. [First published in
Informationsstruktur und
Grammatik
.
Joachim Jacobs (ed.), 112–141. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.]
Kuno, Susumu
1973 The
Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Kuroda, Sige-Yuki
1972 The
categorical and the thetic judgment: Evidence from Japanese syntax.
Foundations of
Language 9: 153–185.
Leiss, Elisabeth
2009 Sprachphilosophie. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lohnstein, Horst
2014 Artenvielfalt
in freier Wildbahn – Generative
Grammatik. In
Syntaxtheorien: Analysen im
Vergleich,
Jörg Hagemann &
Sven Staffeldt (eds), 165–185. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Marty, Anton
1918 Gesammelte
Schriften, II. Bd., 1. Abt. Halle an der Saale: Max Niemeyer.
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
1973 A
University Grammar of
English. Harlow: Longman.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen
1987 The
thetic/categorical distinction
revisited.
Linguistics 25: 511–580.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen
2006 Theticity. In
Pragmatic
Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe,
Giuliano Bernini &
Marcia L. Schwartz (eds), 255–308. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Shibatani, Masayoshi
2017 Nominalization. In
Handbook
of Japanese Syntax,
Masayoshi Shibatani,
Shigeru Miyagawa &
Hisashi Noda (eds), 271–332. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Sornicola, Rosanna
1995 Theticity,
VS order and the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
Sprachtypologie und
Universalienforschung
(STUF) 48: 72–83.
Strawson, Peter Frederic
1950 On
referring.
Mind 59: 320–344.
Zifonun, Gisela, Hoffmann, Ludger & Strecker, Bruno
1997 Grammatik
der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.