Semantics Research Group Meeting, September 30, 2016

This presentation mainly concerns predicate formation in Japanese. Japanese allows appearing multiple NPs which are not selected by the predicate of the proposition. The multiple nominative construction is one of the typical cases. In this case, a sentence in Japanese behaves not only as a proposition but also a predicate. This presentation proposes that a sentence in Japanese becomes a predicate via Predicate Formation in the sense of Rothstein 2004. In addition, this presentation concerns the structure and meaning of the A-no-B construction. Especially, I propose that even in the case that A is phonetically covert, there has to be a phonetically null A, and it works as a variable in the semantic component of grammar. At the end of this presentation, I will suggest that this analysis can be extended to the meaning of the indirect passive construction in Japanese.