Relational Nouns as Anaphors

Relational Nouns as Anaphors Hiroaki NAKAMURA Department of General Subjects, Japan Coast Guard Academy Wakaba-cho 5-1, Kure City, Hiroshima, JAPAN, 737-0832 nakamura@jcga.ac.jp Yoshiki MORI Institute of Linguistics and Literature, University of Tsukuba Tennoudai 1-1-1, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki, JAPAN 305-857 mori@lingua.tsukuba.ac.jp Abstract This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of a set of nouns recently called "Relational Nouns" like mother, neighbor, etc. Relational nouns denote relations between individuals, rather than sets of individuals regular nouns denote, and are referentially dependent on individual-denoting expressions. In Japanese relational nouns may appear 'bare' with no genitive possessors in the noun phrases they project, i.e., but still require the possessors somewhere in sentences. The presence of bare relational nouns allow Japanese to have a lot of peculiar constructions like multiple subject sentence, indirect passives, etc. Assuming the a version of categorial grammar in which the syntax and semantics work in tandem, we discuss the proper way to provide model-theoretic interpretations for expressions containing relational nouns under direct compositionality. 1 Introduction It has recently been argued that the relational nouns has peculiar syntactic and semantic properties quite different from those of regular nouns (see Jacobson 1999, 2000; Partee and Borschev 2000; Vikner and Jenssen 1999; Asudeh 2003, among others). Relational nouns denote a wide range of "relations" like kinship relations as in mother, child, etc., whole-part relations as in hand, height, etc., location relations as in neighbor, local bar, or ownership relations as in (my) book, (my) car, etc. These nouns, however, share common semantic properties we will see shortly. Also this group of nouns have to do with the occurrence of certain constructions peculiar to Japanese. Consider multiple subject sentence (1a), indirect passive (1b) and relativization clause (1c): (1) a. Taroo-ga zikka-ga yuufuku-dearu-(koto). Taroo-NOM parents-home-NOM rich-be-PRESS-(FACT) '(the fact that) Taroo's parents' home is rich' b. Taroo-ga tuma-ni sakidat-are-ta. Taroo-TOP wife-DAT passed-away-PASS-PAST 'Taroo suffered his wife's death.' c. [Tuma-ni sakidat-are-ta otoko-wa] isyoku-nimo fujiyuu-o kanjir-u. wife-DAT passed-away-PASS-REL man-TOP food-or-clothing have-trouble-PRES 'The man who suffered his wife's death suffers hardships in food and clothing.' The existence of the constructions illustrated in (1) in Japanese, unlike in English, should partly be ascribed to the fact that possessors can "run away from home," i.e., the specifier position of relational nouns, or, putting it differently, relational nouns can occur bare without genitive possessor NPs. Though we do not take the genitive NPs preceding relational nouns to literally have the "possessor-relation" to the latter, we continue use the term "possessor", following a long tradition, even when the possessor appears in a position distant from a relational noun it is associated with, as in (2): PACLIC 18, December 8th-10th, 2004, Waseda University, Tokyo - 71 - (2) a. Taroo-no jikka-ga totemo kanemoti-da. Taroo-GEN.POSS family-home-NOM very rich-be-PRES 'Taroo's parents' home is very rich." b. Taroo-ga totemo jikka-ga kanemoti-da. Taroo-NOM.POS very family-home-NOM rich-be-PRES We will argue that relational nouns are referentially dependent on other (referential) nouns, i.e., they have some sort of anaphoric properties. This hypothesis will explain some interesting phenomena like quantification as shown …

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