January 25, 2008: Tomohide Kinuhata, Appositives of Exemplification in Japanese

Potts (2005) claims that right adjunction provides the basis for Nominal Appositives (henceforce 'NAs') and thus the languages like Japanese and Turkish, which lack right adjunction, do not have NAs (Potts 2005: 4.4.2).

In this talk, I argue, against his view, that Japanese has NAs which is left adjoined to the host NP and consequently show that the direction of adjunction is not relevant to the existence of NAs. The construction dealt with in this paper is 'appositives of exemplification.' Direrent from the modifier construction, appositives of exemplification cannot be the focus of negation, conditionals and modality. This leads us to conclude that the exemplifications in appositives have the same status with NAs of English.

Instead of right adjunction hypothesis of Potts (2005), I propose that the difference between English and Japanese is that while the former has ',' (COMMA, or intonational boundary) as a lexicon to implement NAs, the latter owes the same effect to the morphologies. The particles which constitute the appositives of exemplificaiton in Japanese come from sentence final elements or quotatives, and did not primarily have morphological status of modifiers.