B-grade subjects and theticity
This study investigates the linguistic subject in categorical and thetic sentences. In the
“subjectless” thetic sentence, as Kuroda (1972) pointed out, we have a
nonprototypical subject, a B-grade subject, which is preferably combined in Japanese with the nominative marker
ga. By contrasting B-grade subjects in Japanese with their corresponding expressions in German (and
other languages), we discover two types of subjects, internal and external. In Japanese, B-grade subjects are
realizations of internal subjects, which are verbalized differently in other languages as a subject, as a dummy
subject, or an object. Comparing different realization forms of weather expressions crosslinguistically, we suggest
that the language-specific realizations of B-grade subjects correspond to three types of thetic judgments:
entity-central, event-central, and mixed type of both.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Thetic and categorical judgments
- 3.“B-grade subjects” in Onoe (2017)
- 4.B-grade-subjects in German?
- 5.Restriction on the specific indefinite subject
- 6.Two types of Theticity: Entity-central and event-central
- 7.Discussion: Crosslinguistic realization forms of the B-grade subjects with examples from weather verbs
-
Notes
-
References
References
Abraham, Werner
2013 Deutsche
Syntax im Sprachenvergleich 3rd
edn. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Anderson, Stephen
1975 On
the notion of subject in ergative languages. In
Li (ed.), 3–9.
Keenan, Edward L.
1975 Towards a universal
definition of “subject”. In
Li (ed.), 303–333.
Kuroda, Shige-Yuki
1972/1979 The
categorical and the thetic judgment. Evidence from Japanese syntax.
Foundations of
Language 9: 153–185. (
In
this paper, the quotations from 1979 are from his anthology The (W)hole of the Doughnut: Syntax and its
Boundaries
[
Studies in Generative Linguistic Analysis
1]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Original publisher E. Story-Scientia.)
Li, Charles N.
(Ed.) 1975)
Subject
and Topic. New York NY: Academic Press.
Marty, Anton
1918 Spezielles
über den Ausdruck der Urteile und die diesbezüglichen inneren
Sprachformen. In
Anton Marty: Gesammelte
Schriften, 2. Bd., 1. Abt.,
Josef Eisenmeyer /
Alfred Kastil /
Oskar Kraus (eds), 223–301. Halle a.S.: Niemeyer.
Mikami, Akira
1972 Gendai-Gohou-Josetsu:
Syntax-no-kokoromi (
Introduction for modern usages of Japanese: An attempt at syntactic
description). Tokyo: Kuroshio.
Ogawa, Akio
2012 Zur
Typologie der Witterungs-, Klima- und daran angrenzenden Prädikate-unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutschen
und des Japanischen. In
Unpersönliche Konstruktionen.
Prädikatinsformen functional und sprachübergreifend betrachtet,
Angelika Redder,
Akio Ogawa &
Shinichi Kameyama (eds), 201–212. München: iudicium.
Onoe, Keisuke
2017 “-wa”
to “-ga” wo megutte (discussion on -wa and
-ga
). Ms. Tokyo.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen
1987 The
thetic/categorical distinction
revisited.
Linguistics 25: 511–580.
Silverstein, Michael
1976 Hierarchy
of features and ergativity. In
Grammatical Categories in
Australian Languages,
Robert W. M. Dixon (ed.), 112–171. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Tanaka, Shin
2020 Thetik/Kategorik
als funktionale Kategorie: Funktional- universale
Satzstruktur. In
Zur Architektur von Thetik und Kategorik
Deutsch, Japanisch, Chinesisch und Norwegisch,
Werner Abraham,
Elisabeth Leiss &
Shin Tanaka (eds), 149–168. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Tsunoda, Tasaku
1992 Sekai-no-Gengo-to-Nihongo (
Languages
of the World and
Japanese). Tokyo: Kuroshio.
Cited by
Cited by 2 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.