Bottom Copy Pronunciation in Japanese Passives

On the basis of Abe's (2016) proposal that in the case of an A‐chain, any member can be the target for pronunciation, I argue that Japanese passives may have the bottom copies of the produced A‐chains pronounced. When the passivized subjects appear to occupy their original θ‐positions, it is st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inStudia linguistica Vol. 78; no. 3; pp. 555 - 596
Main Author Abe, Jun
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.12.2024
Subjects
Japanese language
Passive voice
Pronunciation
Syntactic movement
Theoretical linguistics
Word order
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Summary:On the basis of Abe's (2016) proposal that in the case of an A‐chain, any member can be the target for pronunciation, I argue that Japanese passives may have the bottom copies of the produced A‐chains pronounced. When the passivized subjects appear to occupy their original θ‐positions, it is standardly claimed that the relevant word order is derived by scrambling other material sentence‐initially. Contrary to this claim, I demonstrate that there are cases, including those of what Miyagawa (1989) calls the causative‐passive construction, where the passivized subjects actually occupy their original θ‐positions. I then provide evidence that those passivized subjects undergo “covert” A‐movement, hence giving support to my bottom copy pronunciation analysis.
Bibliography:Studia Linguistica
for their invaluable comments, which have led to significant improvements in the final version. All remaining errors are solely my own.
The material reported in this article was presented at TOGAKU Theoretical Linguistic Colloquium 16, held at Toyo Gakuen University in May, 2023. I am grateful to the audience for their feedback, especially to Yusuke Yoda and Soichiro Muraoka for helpful comments. Special thanks go to Hiroto Hoshi for giving me insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also deeply indebted to two anonymous reviewers of
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ISSN:0039-3193
1467-9582
DOI:10.1111/stul.12242