Do Transitive Adjectives Really Exist?

Do "Transitive Adjectives" Really Exist? Byung-Soo Park Kyung Hee University Seoul, Korea 130-701 byspark@khu.ac.kr Abstract I argue that the so-called psychological predicates like komapta 'thankful,' mwusepta 'fearful,' silhta `loathsome,' or kulipta 'missing' require a nominative subject and a locative or dative complement, challenging the claim, a conventional wisdom originated from Kuno(1973), that they are two-place "transitive adjectives" requiring a nominative direct object. I also show that those adjectives are subject to having the locative-dative complement extracted, which is ultimately realized as a focused subject or a topic. Thus, in this type of double nominative constructions, the first nominative is a focused subject, and the second nominative forms an embedded clause with the psychological predicate, which functions as the predicate of the whole sentence. 1� Introduction Since Kuno(1973), it seems to have become part of the conventional wisdom of Korean and Japanese syntacticians that certain stative verbs like silhta 'dislike' or cohta 'like', which are often called "psychological" predicates (or psych-verbs in short), take a nominative direct object such as ton-i `money-NOM' (1) Okca-kalnun ton-i/*ton-ul silhta/cohtalkomapta. Okcha-NOM/TOP money-NOM/money-ACC loathsome/good/thankful 'It is to Okcha that money is loathsome/good/thankful. (lit.) (=Okcha dislikes/likes/appreciates money.)' According to this view, the first nominative is the subject and the second nominative is the direct object. Considering that ordinary transitive verbs require accusative direct objects, we can ask why these stative verbs take nominative direct objects. An answer was offered by Kuno (1973): they take nominative objects because they are adjectives. But this answer begs a question: why do adjectives require nominative objects? I am not aware of any answer to this question. In this paper, I challenge the claim that the so-called psychological predicates require a nominative direct object. I argue that those adjectives in (1) requires no direct object (or no patient argument in semantic terms), and that the nominative NP ton-i 'money-NOM' is the subject of the sentence, not the direct object. I will examine all the arguments for the notion of "transitive adjectives," 2 some of which are attributed to Kuno (1973), in some detail and show that none of them are convincing, suggesting that the notion itself is misguided and can be eliminated from Korean syntax. This will lead us to argue for a more traditional, a more common sense view concerning the syntactic nature of the second nominative of a double nominative construction such as (1): the second nominative is the subject. As for the first I The conventional wisdom was accepted by even Kim(2000), one of the most up-to-date, constraint-based approaches to multiple nominative constructions. (See Footnote 5 in Section 3 for my critical comment on it on other accounts.) 2 Kuno(1973) did not use the term « transitive adjective », but I will use it in this paper to refer to stative verbs which Kuno claimed required a nominative direct object. 391 nominative, then, I suggest that it is the "focused" subject. I will mention how focusing is different, in "packaging" information in the sense of Chafe (1976), from topicalization …

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