The So-called Person Restriction of Internal State Predicates in Japanese in Contrast with Thai

PACLIC 28 !120 The So-called Person Restriction of Internal State Predicates in Japanese in Contrast with Thai Satoshi Uehara Kingkarn Thepkanjana Tohoku University Chulalongkorn University 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai Phayathai Road, Bangkok 10330 980-8576 JAPAN THAILAND uehara@intcul.tohoku.ac.jp kingkarn.T@chula.ac.th Abstract Internal state predicates or ISPs refer to internal states of sentient beings, such as emotions, sensations and thought processes. Japanese ISPs with zero pronouns exhibit the “person restriction” in that the zero form of their subjects must be first person at the utterance time. This paper examines the person restriction of ISPs in Japanese in contrast with those in Thai, which is a zero pronominal language like Japanese. It is found that the person restriction is applicable to Japanese ISPs but not to Thai ones. This paper argues that the person restriction is not adequate to account for Japanese and Thai ISPs. We propose a new constraint to account for this phenomenon, i.e., the Experiencer- Conceptualizer Identity (ECI) Constraint, which states that “The experiencer of the situation/event must be identical with the conceptualizer of that situation/event.” It is argued that both languages conventionalize the ECI constraint in ISP expressions but differ in how the ECI constraint is conventionalized. 1 Introduction Japanese is typologically known as a zero pronominal language, in which pronominal elements can take the zero form, unlike those in English. Japanese shares this characteristic with Thai even though the two languages differ drastically in morphological structure and in constituent order. Japanese is an agglutinating and head-final whereas Thai is isolating and head- initial. Zero pronouns, or unexpressed referents, in zero pronominal languages differ from the so- called pro-drop phenomena present in languages such as Italian and Spanish, where subject arguments can be omitted, and the verbal inflections will continue to reflect the person, number and gender of the dropped arguments. Covert referents in East and Southeast Asian languages can occupy various grammatical roles and can be identified through discourse-pragmatic inference rather than through verbal morphology. Interestingly, however, internal state predicates in Japanese are known to have the so-called “person restriction”, which serves to identify the person of the experiencer-subject in a way similar to the pro- drop phenomena, as we see in the following discussion. This paper closely examines the Chulalongkorn University Phayathai Road, Bangkok 10330 THAILAND kingkarn.t@chula.ac.th Kingkarn Thepkanjana Satoshi Uehara Tohoku University 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8576 JAPAN uehara@intcul.tohoku.ac.jp Copyright 2014 by Satoshi Uehara and Kingkarn Thepkanjana 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 120–128 PACLIC 28 !121 internal state predicates (ISPs, henceforth) of Japanese from a contrastive perspective with those of Thai, another zero pronominal language, and makes a typological characterization of ISPs in Japanese and the “person restriction” phenomena exhibited by them. 2 Internal state predicates and the person restriction ISPs are those predicates denoting internal states such as emotions, sensations, thought processes, etc. of sentient beings (Iwasaki 1993). It is well known that ISPs in Japanese exhibit the so-called “person restriction” when they refer to an experiencer’s internal state at the …

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