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Revisiting the structure of nominals in Japanese and Korean

Mixed headedness vs. pure head-finality

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Abstract

Models of nominal structure in Japanese and Korean (JK) are commonly built on the assumption that the nominal domain must be head-final because JK clauses show head-final ordering, rather than being directly supported by observable empirical head-final patterns. In order to produce the surface orders that are found in JK nominals, all head-final analyses require massive hidden movements from underlying structures which are never overtly realized in any surface sequencing. This paper suggests that a much more parsimonious analysis of JK nominal structure is available if JK are not taken to be uniformly head-final in their syntax but exhibit a degree of mixed-headedness, as found in German, Hindi, Hixkaryana, Amharic, Persian and other languages. The paper develops such an analysis, in which underlying head-initial structures do occur in surface syntax, and refines this further with support from the patterning of various numeral-classifier-noun relations in Japanese and Korean. The resulting analysis proposes that the functional structure of JK nominals is head-initial, while the lexical domain (nP, NP) is head-final. Such mixed-headedness is shown to accord with the Final Over Final Constraint/FOFC, and hence is not an unconstrained departure from the pure head-finality widely assumed for JK.

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Notes

  1. The other works on Japanese and Korean referenced here also posit multiple occurrences of movement to derive the surface patterns in JK nominals from the assumed, but unattested head-final base order, though with some variation in the details of this hidden movement. The paper focuses on Watanabe’s (2006) proposal for Japanese, and its reapplication to Korean in An (2018), as these are the most commonly cited analyses of JK nominal structure.

  2. Carstens (2017).

  3. Perhaps with the exception of the linear positioning of case-particles, it will soon be shown that this support for head-finality in the nominal domain actually turns out to be an illusion once the broader, cross-linguistic patterning of case particles is taken into consideration.

  4. The Q-float patterning in (26) shows a clear similarity to the phenomenon of split DPs in German, discussed in Fanselow and Cavar (2002), in which an NP constituent raises to a sentence-initial topic-like position (thanks to a reviewer for pointing this out). The interpretive effect of Q-float in Japanese and Korean may also correspond to DP-splitting in German, with the NP being interpreted as a topic and a focus occurring on the stranded numeral-classifier remnant constituent.

  5. I will not attempt to develop any argument for the specific landing-site of nominal-internal NP-movement in Japanese, Korean, or the other languages referenced here. As this movement is optional in Japanese and Korean, it could be analyzed as scrambling to higher, adjoined positions within the nominal projection or at its edge, in cases of further movement out of the nominal projection, as in (28).

  6. Fukui and Sakai (2003) show that the attachment of case particles can be made to sequences of words which do not comprise syntactic constituents, in contrast to the occurrence of postpositions, which are not possible in the same environments (see examples 19a/b in Nakamura 2012). To account for the sometimes odd syntactic placement of case particles in contrast to postpositions, Fukui and Sakai suggest that the latter are real syntactic heads, which can only be merged in appropriate positions projected by syntactic structure, whereas case particles are attached post-syntactically, and hence may appear in positions that do not correspond to syntactic heads. Nakamura (2012) shows that the movement of PPs in sluicing constructions may violate island constraints, as ellipsis is able to save such syntactic violations, but the movement of case-inflected NPs is not possible in the same environments. Nakamura argues that the movement violation in both cases must be assumed to be saved by ellipsis, and that the ill-formedness of the NPs in such examples can be attributed to a failure of case-transfer in a post-syntactic morphology component, affecting case-marked NPs but not PPs. Both such works follow a perspective on case-marking originating with Kuroda (1965, 1988) which argues that Japanese case-marking is fundamentally different from case-marking in languages such as English, because Japanese is a language without agreement, and agreement does not play a role in case-marking in Japanese (Agree in minimalist terms). The attachment of case-particles is instead argued to be determined in top-down linear way following the creation of syntactic structures (Linear Case Marking, Kuroda 1965), hence post-syntactically.

  7. Specifically, I assume that nominative and accusative particles may be attached post-syntactically as suffixes to any NP node. In Pattern A, this results in the sequence [Num CL NP-ga/-o] as in (6b/d). In Pattern B, it can be assumed that nominative/accusative case particles may attach either to the raised position of an NP [NPk-ga/-o Num Cl ] as in (6c), or to the copy of an NP in its base position [NPk Num Cl  ] as in (6a). For genitive case, I adopt the classic mod-insertion account in Kitagawa and Ross (1982), in which -no is inserted between a modifier and a noun:

    1. (i)

      Mod-Insertion: [NP…XP Nα]→ [NP…XP Mod Nα], where Mod = no (from Saito et al. 2008:249).

  8. There is also a general typological argument which can be given against the assumption that case particles in Japanese and other languages are syntactic heads and consequently provide information about the head-initiality/head-finality of nominal projections. In a broad cross-linguistic study of languages with overt case-marking elements, Dryer (2013) reports a striking asymmetry in the distribution of case particles relative to their nominal hosts, with pre-nominal case-marking being very rare in comparison to post-nominal case-marking, occurring at a ratio of only 1:10 (55 vs. 575 languages). Were the positioning of case particles relative to the NP to align with the head-directionality dominant in a language/nominal projection, one would expect to find case particles regularly preceding nominal constituents in head-initial languages, as heads of head-initial CasePs. However, large-scale studies such as Dryer (2013) and Blake (2001) show that this is very infrequently attested, and the overwhelming descriptive generalization is that case particles attach post-nominally as suffixes across languages. Such observations support the assumption that case-particles do not head Case-Phrases which can be taken to mirror the head-directionality elsewhere present in a language and that the syntactic organization of nominal projections as head-initial or head-final cannot reliably be deduced from the linear positioning of its case-marking elements.

  9. Many thanks to Tomoko Ishizuka, Hiroto Nakagome and Satoshi Shigeoka (personal communication) for the Japanese data and judgments.

  10. Concerning how NP-movement within nominals gives rise to a pseudo-partitive interpretation, I would like to tentatively suggest that the demonstrative present in (30-33) acts in a way like certain focus-sensitive operators such as the particle shi in Mandarin Chinese which impose a strict locality requirement on their associate—immediate linear adjacency (see Chiu 1993). In JK, a base sequencing of [Dem Num CL NP] can be hypothesized to result in demonstratives scoping only over the full, adjacent constituent [two classifier book]], causing a non-partitive interpretation, and it will not be possible for the demonstrative to associate just with the lower, embedded NP [NP book] (excluding the numeral and classifier from its modification-scope) to bring about a pseudo-partitive interpretation. For such an interpretation to arise, the NP associate needs to occur linearly adjacent to the demonstrative (building a structure with the interpretation [[Dem this [NP book]], two copies of it]), and this can be achieved by NP-movement: [Dem [[NP]k [Num CL tk]]. Such a view of the alternations in (30-33) clearly needs to be fleshed out more but captures the basic intuition that raising in Pattern B allows for the NP either to be scoped over locally by the demonstrative, resulting in the pseudo-partitive reading, or to be interpreted in its base position, causing the demonstrative high scope reading, whereas the (hypothesized) lack of any movement in Pattern A restricts its interpretation, and the demonstrative is unable to scope locally over just the NP. For further discussion of pseudo-partitives in general, see Rutkowski (2007), Matushansky (2017), and Rothstein (2011).

  11. Such an assumption avoids the conclusion that nouns in this set come in two different semantic types, a mass-noun type which needs a classifier in order to be partitioned in numeral quantification, and an inherently individualized noun type which can be directly modified by numerals. See Simpson and Ngo (2018) for a similar suggestion with optional-classifier nouns in Vietnamese.

  12. These works present analyses of the licensing of null D elements and null numeral ‘one’ in Chinese.

  13. See also Bangla, where special morpho-phonological forms are found with classifiers only when combined with low numerals which otherwise pattern clearly as heads for syntactic processes (see Simpson and Syed 2016:758):

    1. (i)
      figure aa

  14. As the Korean patterns described in this section do not occur in Japanese, it can be concluded that a zero classifier has not become part of the lexical specification of any noun in Japanese (like the majority of nouns in Korean, which do not permit a zero classifier). Alternatively, it might be assumed that the licensing condition on such a null head cannot be satisfied in Japanese, as numerals do not occur in head positions in this language—numerals in Japanese would therefore structurally be like higher native Korean numerals and Sino-Korean numerals in Korean.

  15. The adjectives and agent and theme arguments in (43–44) must always precede the noun. They may sometimes scramble leftwards within nominal phrases, but may never appear after the noun.

  16. Note that the examples (43) and (44) do not include overt Possessors, as the stacking of three arguments is often felt to be a little awkward. However a Possessor could be substituted for the Agent in these examples and has convincingly been argued in An (2018) to be base-generated low down in the lexical core of nominal projections.

  17. See Kalin (2014) who presents evidence that the A′-domain of clauses in Hixkaryana is head-initial, and the lexical domain head-final. This division in clausal headedness between the functional and lexical domains is clearly very similar to the functional/lexical division proposed here for JK nominals.

  18. Although there have also been challenges to FOFC, see for example Liao (2017), Aboh (2020) and references within.

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Simpson, A. Revisiting the structure of nominals in Japanese and Korean. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 573–597 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09510-5

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