Nominative-marked Phrases in Japanese Tough Constructions

Copyright 2012 by Akira Ohtani and Maria del Pilar Valverde Ibanez 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language,Information and Computation pages 272–279 Nominative-marked Phrases in Japanese Tough Constructions Akira Ohtani Faculty of Informatics, Osaka Gakuin University 2-36-1 Kishibe-minami, Suita-shi, Osaka, 564-8511, Japan ohtani@ogu.ac.jp Maria del Pilar Valverde Iba˜nez Faculty of Foreign Language, Aichi Prefectural University 1522-3 Ibaragabasama, Nagakute-shi, Aichi, 480-1198, Japan valverde@for.aichi-pu.ac.jp Abstract In this paper we conduct a detailed exami- nation of the tough construction in Japanese with the main focus on some types of nom- inative case particles ga. They are correlated with the difference not only in the nominative- genitive case alternation but also in the seman- tic or pragmatic interpretation. Based on these data, we discuss the categories of the nomi- native case particles and derivations for tough predicates within the framework of Combina- tory Categorial Grammar. 1 Introduction In English, it is well known that infinitival clauses can be used after certain adjectives that express eas- iness as (1), difficulty as (2) and so on. (1) a. It is easy to please John. b. John is easy to please. (2) a. It is hard for the students to read this paper. b. This paper is hard for the students to read. Sentences (1a) and (1b) convey the same meaning: John is interpreted as an EXPERIENCER or a recip- ient of the action of pleasing, regardless of whether it is the object of the verb please in the complement clause as (1a), or it is the subject of the matrix clause with the object of please missing as (1b). From the beginning of transformational grammar, much atten- tion has been paid to the so-called tough construc- tion (1b) and (2b) (Postal, 1971; Chomsky, 1973; among others). In Japanese, it has often been noted in the liter- ature on transformational generative grammar that sentence (3)1 below shares syntactic properties with the tough sentences listed in (1b) and (2b). (3) Gakusei-ni-wa student-for-TOP kono this zisyo-ga dictionary-NOM tukai-yasui. use-easy ‘This dictionary is easy for students to use.’ (Inoue, 2004:76) Different from English, phrase(s) other than the di- rect object of the main predicate can be marked with nominative case ga in Japanese tough sentences, as we will see below. To account for such a difference, we will argue that there are two types of nominative case marking in Japanese. The organization of this paper will be as follows: In section 2 and 3, we will observe several types and properties of Japanese tough construction. In sec- tion 4 and 5, we will show that there are two types of the nominative case particle ga and their formal analysis. Section 6 will conclude our paper. 2 Tough Construction in Japanese The tough construction in Japanese is a sentence that involves a main predicate with adjectives such as ya- sui ‘easy’ or nikui ‘hard’, ‘difficult’, or ‘tough’. Ac- cording to Inoue (1978; 2004), there are four types of tough constructions in Japanese: 1Examples cited from other papers are slightly modified be- cause …

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