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The main objective of this paper is to show that the syntactic behavior of negative polarity items (NPIs) allows us to assess whether or not an argument undergoes A-movement in Japanese. Japanese has two types of NPIs. One type of NPI, which is referred to as the ‘argument modifier’ type, is licensed with reference to the surface A-position of the argument which it modifies (i.e. this type of NPI is licensed in a position in which the argument appears after A-movement, if it applies) and the other, which is referred to as the ‘floating modifier’ type, can be licensed in the underlying theta-marking position where its host argument is first merged (i.e. the position before the host undergoes A-movement). Data regarding the two types of NPIs reveal that in Japanese, subject raising is conditioned by the property of tense (T): if T carries a Case feature to value the Case feature of a nominative argument, it also has an EPP feature to induce subject raising, but if T does not carry any Case feature, it does not have an EPP feature. The NPI data also show that in Japanese, negative nai is head-raised when it is associated with a predicate with some verbal properties.

In light of extensive studies on the English do so construction, this paper investigates the lesser-known counterpart in Chinese as well as the properties of the words do and so. It will be shown that Chinese provides clearer evidence for analyzing this do as a light verb spelling out the eventuality predicate DO and takes a VP as its complement, which contains so. The analysis of the structure and derivation of the do so construction proposed in this work will be supported by comparison with related predicate anaphors and the structure containing a verb and so (such as I think so). The results of this study help resolving controversies relating to various constituency and argument structures. The cases illustrated are the ba construction, apparent prenominal PPs, control structures, and argument vs. non-argument PPs.

Subject honorification in Japanese is often characterized as targeting subjects, but in this article, I propose to formulate it as vP-level agreement, where an honorific head agrees with an argument (carrying the semantic feature [+honorific]) that appears in its associated Spec,vP. This proposal provides a straightforward account for some honorification facts which cannot be accounted for if subject honorification is simply taken to target subjects: namely, (1) the fact that subject honorification is often, but not always, possible at two distinct structural levels in the aspectual construction where the main verb is followed by the aspectual verb iru; (2) the fact that in the possessive construction with the animate verb iru ‘have’, subject honorification can target not only the dative subject but also the nominative object. Furthermore, on the basis of what I call ‘the kara-subject construction’, the overt constituent position of subjects is shown to vary according to whether T contains the Case feature [+nominative] to license a nominative argument: Subjects undergo raising to Spec,TP when T carries [+nominative], but when T lacks it, subjects are not raised to Spec,TP.

Trong nghiên cứu này, chúng tôi đã kiểm tra các tuyên bố của Lucy (1992a, 1992b) rằng sự khác biệt giữa các hệ thống đánh dấu số lượng được sử dụng bởi người Yucatec Maya và tiếng Anh dẫn đến việc người nói các ngôn ngữ này chú ý khác nhau đến thành phần vật liệu hoặc hình dạng của các đối tượng. Để đánh giá giả thuyết của Lucy, chúng tôi đã tái hiện thí nghiệm phân loại đối tượng quan trọng của ông bằng cách sử dụng người nói tiếng Anh và tiếng Nhật, một ngôn ngữ có hệ thống đánh dấu số lượng rất giống với hệ thống được sử dụng bởi người Yucatec Maya. Kết quả của chúng tôi đã không tái hiện được các phát hiện của Lucy. Cả người nói tiếng Nhật và tiếng Anh, những người có nền văn hóa và giáo dục tương đương, đã phân loại các đối tượng chủ yếu dựa trên hình dạng hơn là thành phần vật liệu, cho thấy rằng các phát hiện ban đầu của Lucy có thể không phải do sự khác biệt giữa các hệ thống đánh dấu số lượng của người Yucatec Maya và tiếng Anh mà là do sự khác biệt trong nền văn hóa và giáo dục của các nhóm thí nghiệm mà ông đã sử dụng. Các giải thích thay thế về những hậu quả nhận thức của sự khác biệt ngôn ngữ trong các hệ thống đánh dấu số lượng cũng được thảo luận.

The Korean conditional markers myen and tamyen have been distinguished in terms of the speaker’s epistemic stance: while myen can be used with any speaker attitude, tamyen is only used with a hypothetical or irrealis attitude. However, tamyen-antecedents do not always express such an irrealis speaker attitude. This paper analyses the difference between myen and tamyen in terms of the modes of language use, i.e., descriptive and metarepresentational uses. It introduces the concept of interpretive use as defined and used in relevance theory and suggests that the ta in tamyen functions as an interpretive use marker. The presence of this interpretive use marker is responsible for the different felicities between myen- and tamyen-conditionals. Since a tamyen-antecedent is a metarepresentation of another representation, it is not used to describe a state of affairs in the content domain. This explains why deictic, generic, and temporal conditionals are more often used with myen, and given conditionals (i.e., conditionals whose antecedents are contextually given) with tamyen.

How is the (in)-dependence (or finiteness) of a clause identified in a language that has no tense, case, or agreement morphology, such as Chinese? This paper investigates the control verb construction and the generic sentential subject construction, bringing to light the special forms and interpretations of the subjects of the dependent clauses in the constructions. The special properties are not found in the subjects of independent clauses. Therefore, contrasts between dependent and independent clauses are attestable in the language. The paper also proposes a derived predication analysis of the interpretation patterns of embedded empty subjects of the language.

To establish an effective training paradigm for a computer-assisted language learning system that enables non-native learners to exploit native-like perceptual cues for identifying length contrasts, e.g., consonant length, in the Japanese language (hereafter, Japanese length contrast), two experiments were conducted to investigate the identification accuracies of native Korean listeners before and after intensive perceptual training. The first experiment assessed the perceptual characteristics that native Korean listeners show when identifying the length contrast in the face of variation in speaking rate. The results suggested that native Korean listeners identify length contrasts by relying on a fixed-length criterion instead of adapting to changes in speaking rate. Also, Korean listeners showed a noticeable bias toward geminate responses for all speaking rates, with a stronger bias for slower speaking rates. The second experiment was based on these perceptual characteristics of Korean listeners. It investigated the extent to which intensive training helps improve listeners’ ability to identify Japanese length contrast and to examine whether greater stimulus variability during training leads to more robust training effects. The overall results showed that the perceptual training improved Korean listeners’ ability to perceive consonant length contrast. Moreover, misidentification of geminates decreased at post-test. However, the effect of training did not differ greatly between conditions of high stimulus variability during training (training with three speaking rates) and low stimulus variability (training with a single speaking rate). Training also did not generalize to perception of untrained contrast type (vowel length contrast). These results suggest that while perceptual training helps Korean learners learn a new, difficult-to-learn L2 phonemic length contrast, it is still difficult for learners to acquire native-like perceptual criteria.