In Japanese, desiderative (and potential) predicates derived from transitive verbs allow their direct object to be marked with the nominative marker ga, instead of the expected accusative marker o. This article argues that the nominative/accusative alternation in a desiderative construction has an information-structural implication. Nominative-marking on the object indicates its focushood, i.e., that it is either the focus of the utterance or part thereof, whereas accusative-marking has no such information-structural bearing. This claim is motivated by the observation that the direct object of a desiderative predicate resists nominative-marking when it is not adjacent to the predicate (“adjacency effect”). Under our account, the adjacency effect can be regarded as a variety of the garden-path effect, stemming from the discrepancy between the default (expected) locus of the focus and the pragmatic information conveyed by nominative-marking. With three sets of experimental data (from two acceptability judgment experiments with written stimuli and one rating experiment with auditory stimuli), we demonstrate that (i) the adjacency effect is real, and (ii) it can be mitigated by prosodic or contextual cues signaling the focushood of the object. The second finding conforms well to our hypothesis that the adjacency effect is a processing-based phenomenon, rather than a reflection of a purely syntactic constraint.

中文翻译：

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日语中的主格/宾格交替和信息结构

在日语中，从及物动词派生的谓语（和可能）谓词允许其直接宾语用主格标记ga标记，而不是预期的宾格标记o。本文认为，期望构想中的主格/宾格交替具有信息结构的含义。在对象上的标称标记表示其聚焦性，即它是发声的焦点或其一部分，而宾语标记则没有这种信息结构的影响。此主张的动机是观察到，当一个谓词谓词的直接宾语与谓词不相邻时，它会抵制主语标记（“邻接效应”）。在我们的解释下，邻接效应可以看作是各种花园路径效应，其源于焦点的默认（预期）轨迹与主格标记传达的语用信息之间的差异。利用三组实验数据（来自两个具有书面刺激的可接受性判断实验和一个具有听觉刺激的评级实验），我们证明了（i）邻接效应是真实的，并且（ii）可以通过韵律或上下文暗示信号来缓解对象的聚焦性。第二个发现很好地符合我们的假设，即邻接效应是一种基于处理的现象，而不是纯粹的句法约束的反映。