Note on Japanese Epistemic Verb Constructions: A Surface-Compositional Analysis

Note on Japanese Epistemic Verb Constructions: A Surface-Compositional Analysis⋆ Akira Ohtani and Mark Steedman School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK {aotani, steedman}@inf.ed.ac.uk Abstract. This paper offers a new analysis of the raising to object construction in Japanese. This has been extensively discussed following Kuno (1976) for the case where the ma- trix predicate is an epistemic verb. Under CCG analysis an o-marked phrase is a surface- compositional object rather than a raised argument. This new approach correctly predicts the thetic and categorical judgments of epistemic verb constructions, which have hitherto only been accounted for by the studies which emphasize only the syntactic aspects of the construction. Keywords: raising to object (RTO), epistemic verbs, the thetic and categorical judgments, surface-compositional, Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) 1 Introduction In some languages, an argument that belongs semantically to an embedded clause is realized syn- tactically as an object of a matrix clause, this “raising to object” (RTO) is schematized as follows: (1) [matrix subject ... objecti . .. [embedded ti . .. ] ... ] The term “raising” has its origin in the transformational analysis of such constructions in which the subject of the lower clause is “raised” to become the object of the matrix verb. English has many examples of RTO verbs (consider, believe, think, etc.), which can be classi- fied together as “epistemic verbs” (verbs of thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc.) in semantic terms. The RTO epistemic verbs take three kinds of complement clause, a fully-fledged clause as in (2a), an infinitive clause as in (2b), and a small clause as in (2c) below: (2) a. I considered [ (that) she was intelligent.] b. I considered [ her to be intelligent.] c. I considered [ her intelligent.] Although her in (2b) and (2c) is understood semantically to be the subject of to be intelligent referring to the equivalence of propositional contents against (2a), they are both syntactic objects of consider. In this analysis, the argument her is “raised” from its initial position as the subject of the embedded clause to its final position as the main clause object as illustrated in (1). There has been much debate about the derivation of RTO constructions such as that of (2b). In English, Postal (1974), Lasnik and Saito (1991), and others argue that (2b) involves the RTO movement illustrated in (1). Chomsky, on the other hand, argues that the derivation is either by the Exceptional Case-marking (ECM) process under S-deletion (Chomsky, 1981) or by IP- complementation (Chomsky, 1986). However, his motivation for not accepting the RTO analyses is mainly theoretical. ⋆ We are indebted to the anonymous PACLIC reviewers and to Kiyota Hashimoto, Takeo Kurafuji, and Robert Logie for their invaluable comments on the earlier version of this paper. This research is partially supported by the Human Communication Research Centre in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), 21500152 of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Copyright 2009 by …

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