Reintroducing inverse constructions in Japanese

The deictic verb kuru “to come” in the paradigms of argument encoding

Hiroaki Koga | University of Tokyo, Komaba

Toshio Ohori | University of Tokyo, Komaba

This paper reexamines the Japanese deictic verb kuru “to come” within the RRG framework and argues that its auxiliary use should be analyzed as a kind of inverse marker, elaborating on Shibatani (e.g., 2003). We show that the division of labor between the active-passive system and the direct-inverse system in Japanese involves complicated pragmatic factors. Specifically, it is when a Privileged Syntactic Argument (PSA) is topical but there is another participant that outranks PSA on the person hierarchy (usually speaker or hearer) that the direct-inverse paradigm is obligatorily used, although it may be optionally employed when a PSA is in focus domain. The present study adds a new insight to the growing body of studies on inverse phenomena (Payne 1994), as well as to the typology of PSAs proposed in rrg.

Published online: 21 November 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.105.07kog

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Konnerth, Linda

2015. A new type of convergence at the deictic center. Studies in Language 39:1 ► pp. 24 ff.

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