Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Japanese

1.2.1 The Lexicon

It is obvious that this knowledge is not predictable from anything. There is no reason why the object that we call a cat should be called a cat, as witnessed by the fact that other languages do not use this word to refer to the same object (e.g. macska (Hungarian), chat (French), Katze (German), gato (Spanish), quatus (Maltese) kot (Russian), kissa (Finnish), neko (Japanese), mao (Chinese), paka (Swahili)). Moreover, there is nothing about the pronunciation [kaet] that means that it must refer to this object: one can imagine a language in which the word pronounced [kaet] is used for almost anything else. This kind of linguistic knowledge is not ‘rule governed’, but is just arbitrary facts about particular languages.

6.2.2 Do-insertion

Because of its behaviour, the Finnish negative element is often called the negative auxiliary or even a negative verb. Moreover, in other languages the negative element surfaces as a bound morpheme on the verb, a situation very similar to the analysis we have given the aspectual markers in English. This is exemplified by the following Choctaw and Japanese sentences:

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

We know that the complementiser is the head of the CP and that this provides the relevant features for the force interpretation of the sentence. Some complementisers are interrogative and some are declarative. Thus, when the clause is interrogative, presumably it has an interrogative complementiser and vice versa if the clause is declarative. In yes–no questions, therefore, we might expect the clause to have an interrogative complementiser. As we can see no complementiser in such sentences, we must assume it to be abstract. The assumption of such an element is supported by the fact that in some languages a morpheme with exactly these properties appears overtly. For example, in Japanese, a yes–no question is marked by the appearance of the morpheme ka at the end of the clause. Thus, the difference between (43a) and (43b) is that the first is declarative and the second interrogative:

7.3.4 The interaction between wh-movement and inversion

In Japanese, the complementiser goes in the final position of the clause and so the question particle is suitably analysed as a complementiser. Thus, we might claim that English is similar to this, the main difference being that the question particle is covert in English: