Qualia Structure and the Accessibility of Arguments : Japanese Internally-Headed Relative Clauses with Implicit Target

QUALIA STRUCTURE AND THE ACCESSIBILITY OF ARGUMENTS: JAPANESE INTERNALLY-HEADED RELATIVE CLAUSES WITH IMPLICIT TARGET Chiharu Uda Kikuta Department of English Doshisha University Karasuma Imadegawa, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto, 602-8580 JAPAN Email:cuda@ mail.doshisha.ac.jp ABSTRACT The relationship between lexicon and pragmatics has been one of the most controversial issues in recent studies in linguistics. Lexicon in the conservative definition encodes only the information responsible for the regular syntactic mapping of lexical items. Any information that is not directly reflected in the syntactic structure is attributed to pragmatics. A more recent trend, in contrast, considers that lexicon should cover even apparently non-linguistic information if it leads to certain syntactic and/or semantic regularities. Generative Lexicon (GL) by Pustejovsky is a representative of such a trend. This paper applies GL to analyze the Japanese internally-headed relative clause (henceforth, IHRC) with implicit target, which has presented a serious challenge to formal approaches. The IHRC whose target is neither a syntactic argument nor an adjunct has strongly motivated a pragmatic approach to the identification of the target. This paper argues that IHRCs with implicit target can be formally accommodated without drawing on the poorly-defined pragmatics, if the lexicon is sufficiently elaborated. 1. INTRODUCTION Japanese IHRCs present several puzzling behaviors that challenge most syntactic approaches to them. One of such behaviors concerns the identification of the antecedent (henceforth, the (semantic) target) of the IHRC. Namely, the target is not limited to an argument of the head verb of an IHRC; in some cases it can be a set of arguments, while in others it can even be some entity merely implicit in the sentence. In order to accommodate such cases, most analyses posit an empty category as the relative head, whose antecedent is determined by some pragmatic considerations ([1], [2], [6]). The recourse to contextual information is shared by other approaches including the ones in Cognitive Grammar ([3], [4]). The analyses in Cognitive Grammar state that the target is selected from among salient participants of the situation, where the saliency is related to but is independent of syntactic argumenthood One question that emerges is what the "pragmatic" considerations licensing the implicit target exactly are. Obviously, only a certain set of implicit arguments can stand as the target. Without due restrictions, the theory would become too powerful, overgenerating the IHRCs with illicit implicit targets. Besides, the complete recourse to pragmatics predicts that the availability of the implicit target is totally independent of the lexical information; it would be sensitive only to the contextual information. However, as we shall see below, the distribution of the IHRC with an implicit target is actually very limited, and the restrictions reveal regularities related to lexical information. If a syntactic analysis assumes a lexicon which accommodates only what is structurally realized, then the IHRC with an implicit target falls outside the scope of analysis. But if one assumes a lexicon- based framework which includes in its lexicon even the non-linguistic information of some kind, the implicit target could be dealt with in a formally restricted way. …

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