Heads and layers in agglutination: A case in deadjectival psych verbs with -garu in Japanese

3.1 Heads and layers in -garu

Is DVA correct? I argue that it is not, and g, and ar- in -garu are not vestigial but very active and relevant well into this day. I propose that g and ar- are heads in the sense of DM (Hale and Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997, 2007, 2013). The core insights are the diachronic (de)compositionality (cf. TC) and layered syntactic structures that result from it. I propose that g is “little” v (Arad 2003, Marantz 2007, Ramchand 2008, Embick 2010) that types roots as V. I take g to be “little” v because, first, it merges with the root, second, it does not alternate with roots, and third, it is obligatory as the unacceptable *√kanasi-ar-u shows. The unacceptability is not simply due to the violation of *VV hiatus /ia/ in Japanese phonology because other possible forms that lack k such as *√kanasi-ru or *√kanasi-rar-u are also unacceptable even though they do not violate the (C)V mora structure. A typed root extends its projection with Voice (Diesing 1992, Hale and Keyser 2002, Borer 2005, Ramchand 2008, Harley 2008, and others) that licenses an argument that plays a broad role in bringing about an event. The vP and the VoiceP make up the “inner morphology.” The grammaticalized copula ar- takes the VoiceP as complement and licenses its own argument in the “outer morphology.” The argument the copula licenses and pro are coindexed. Under this scheme, (13) (=8b) is analyzed as (14) below.

(13)	Hanako ga neko no	si	o kanasi-gar-ta.
	Nom cat Gen death Acc sad-gar-Pft
	(Hanako seems/appears to be sad about the death of the cat.)

Note that in (14), the agglutinative predicate formation is isomorphic to syntactic structure building. In the following subsections, I will present pieces of evidence that support this analysis. The first piece of evidence comes from the unique dual and conflicting characteristics of the subjects in the -garu-derived deadjectival predicates where the subject Hanako in (14) is both the Experiencer and the Agent of the predicate simultaneously.

3.2 -garu as Psych Verb

Since -garu verbalizes the PSE adjectives, I assume that they are psych verbs that resemble Type I psych verbs, or Subject Experiencer (SE) verbs, such as temere and fear in Italian and English, respectively (Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Pesetsky 1995). In these psych verbs, the subject is Experiencer and the object (Theme) is the target of emotion.

In the Japanese example (13), Hanako is the Experiencer of the psychological state of sadness. Importantly, however, this is not the end of the story. She is also the Agent in the sense that she “acts” in accordance with her inner experience. This is the characteristic interpretation of the -garu psych verbs that Sugioka (2009) calls the [+Externalization] feature of -garu.

The Italian and English examples (15a) and (15b), respectively, do not show the externalization effect and simply state the fact about Gianni and John. In Japanese as well, the adjectival predicate (16) lacks the externalization effect entirely and is equivalent to the Italian and English cases.

Furthermore, there is a discourse ambiguity in the behavior of Hanako in (13) in that it is not ultimately clear whether she was sad or not. I will show that these unique characteristics of the -garu subject arise as consequences of the layered morphosyntax in (14).

3.3 The source of causation [+c]

We have seen that the role Actor is not specified for [c] feature and is not a sufficient causer of the event. This leaves us with the question where the cause interpretation comes from. After all, the event of Hanako’s acting sad occurred. I believe that the answer to this question lies in the general properties of Type I psych verbs. Recall that Theme is the target of emotion with these verbs. I repeat the relevant examples in Italian and English here.

In these cases, the Theme questo “this” or this is understood to be the source or the “trigger” of the psychological reaction of the subject. Under this interpretation, I propose that the same “trigger” comes from the Theme in the -garu psych verbs as well. Let us see how this becomes possible.

Causation is a broad concept, and there could be multiple reasons for an event to take place. For instance, suppose that a violent storm hit the area, and John forgot to lock the window before the storm came. Upon landfall, the wind violently pushed open the window and subsequently shattered the glass. In this case, either John or the storm can be the causer of the window being broken. John could be the causer by being negligent, and the storm could also be the causer by affecting the window with its brute force. Importantly, the causer is up to the interpretation and perception of the speaker. This is what Neelman and van de Koot (2012) argue. They claim that causation cannot be fully specified by a verb alone. More realistically, there are many forces that could potentially cause an event to occur in the speaker’s perception and the mental model of the event, and the most prominent force that a speaker recognizes is considered as the causer, or the Crucial Contributing Factor (CCF) for the occurrence of the event. Following their proposal and the general nature of Type I psych verbs, I assume that in (14) the Theme neko no si “the death of the cat” is understood to be the CCF that motivates the Agent to behave (or to act) in certain ways.

To recapitulate, I developed an LPD approach that explains how some of the characteristic properties of the -garu psych predicates are derived. Adjectival roots are typed to V by the “little” head g and appears in the transitive verb construction. The Voice in the inner morphology licenses subject (pro) which has Agent θ-role, and it is this subject that is responsible for the [+Externalization] effect. The grammaticalized copula ar- takes the VoiceP as complement and licenses its own Experiencer subject. These two subjects are coindexed within the same but dichotomous predicate. The feature incongruency between the two subjects is dissolved by the ambiguity that the Actor interpretation brings in, who is motivated to act in certain ways by the event in Theme but is noncommittant to the occurrence of it. What we witness here is the complex dependencies among the constituents in the layers. Without decomposing -garu, the morphosyntax and morphosemantics of the -garu predicates would have remained intangible.

One may question, as one anonymous reviewer does, whether the decomposition of -garu is necessary. Under this single morpheme approach, -garu derives the SE psych verbs and assigns a special θ-role to the subject that is somehow compatible with Agent and Experiencer simultaneously and allow [+Externalization] phenomenon. This is, however, exactly what has gone wrong in the previous analyses. To see this, take a closer look at -garu again. It has the aspectual marker u. That is, -garu is either -gar-u or -ga-ru depending upon how one analyzes the consonant /r/ to be, a critical and very important matter in Japanese morphophonemics that has profound ramifications to syntax and semantics (Kuginuki 1996, Labrune 2014, de Chene 2016, Nakajima 2017). To the best of my knowledge, no serious attempts have been made to postulate -ga as a morpheme in the verbal domain in the literature. Furthermore, one of the most important sources for the extension of Japanese morphosyntax has continuously been the suffixation of various functional items that are grammaticalized lexical entries (Frellesvig 2006, Narrog 2017), but neither -gar nor -ga seems to be independently verifiable as a part of the Japanese lexicon at any given time in the history of the language. Thus, postulating -gar or ga- without diachronic support is ad hoc and could only be pursued at the expense of losing significant intra- and crosslinguistic generalizations (Kuteva 2001).

In Section 3.4, I would like to turn our attention to the adjectival predicate (8a) for the comparison between adjectival and deadjectival predicates that leads us to an interesting discovery.

3.4 Adjectival derivation

The adjectival and deadjectival predicates in (8a) and (8b), which are repeated below, differ minimally at one point; the former has k-ar-u but the latter g -ar-u.

The surface similarities need to be treated with care. Recall that we explicated g and ar- from √kanasigatta, “seemed sad” by TC in Section 3. The same argument would motivate the decomposition of the adjectival predicate (21a) as √kanasi-k-ar-ta. I would like to argue, however, that the predicate should be analyzed as √kanasi-k-u-ar-ta where the imperfective aspectual marker u is present (Kuno 1973, Shibatani 1990, Nishiyama 1999). In other words, there is an additional inflectional phrase (IP) layer. See the structure below.

In (22), k is “little” a, since it merges first with the root and is obligatory like g is. The aP lacks spec position due to the adjectival nature. A is the adjectival equivalent to the verbal Voice and licenses the subject. In other words, adjectives share the syntactic structure with unergative verbs where it only has the external argument but lacks the internal one. As a consequence, the NP neko no si “the death of the cat” is licensed by Low Applicative head (Pylkkänen 2002).^[18] The imperfective marker u makes the Irrealis and the Adverbial forms of the conjugational patterns but lacks active grammatical and semantic roles. Thus, it lacks spec position. Phonologically speaking, u drops in (22) due to the general ban on VV hiatus. In Section 5, I will present a piece of evidence for the presence the IP layer in the adjectival predicates but not in deadjectival -garu predicates.

3.5 On g and voicing assimilation

In the previous sections, I treated g and k as “little” v and “little” a, respectively. Because k and g appear in the same position as “little” heads but differ minimally with [±voice], it is natural to ask if they are related. In the literature, they have not been considered as related. Kuroda (1965: 200, fn. 6), for instance, takes a position that “[k]at in kowakat-ta [‘was afraid’ T.N.] is an infix attached to the past form of the adjective and has nothing to do with the suffix gar , which happens to appear in phonetically similar form, gat , before the past marker ta.” He does not elaborate, however, what sort of infix gar and gat are even though infixes are extremely rare, if there are any, in Japanese. In this study, I take an opposite view and propose that they are related: k is homophonous between “little” v and “little” a and is voiced in verbal predicate due to a structural locality condition on voicing assimilation.

What (23) says is that the voicing occurs only when there is no IP boundary. On structural effects on PF exponents, Embick (2013) proposes a general locality condition on how morphemes are to be realized at PF.

There are two types of linear adjacency. One type is that two morphemes align next to each other [Morpheme/Morpheme (M/M) Rules], and the other type is that two morphemes are phonologically adjacent [Morphophonological (M/P) Rules, e.g., autosegmental adjacency]. The allomorphy in verbs in past tense in English such as go–went is a good example of the former, since the verb and T must be linearly adjacent (V^⌒T) to have the effect on the exponent. Importantly, T cannot apply to another morpheme by skipping the verb. An exemplar case of the latter M/P Rule is seen in metaphony observed in Ischia, a dialect in Italian (Calabrese 1999, cited in Embick 2013: 158). In this dialect, second person singular agreement morpheme ǝ triggers metaphony in verbal root.

Note that the AGR morpheme ǝ changes the vowel a to schwa/epsilon that is autosegmentally adjacent to it. In this case, the rule can skip intervening morphemes. I take the intervocalic voicing k → g in the deadjectival predicates is a case of M/P rule that skips the intervening heads. Crucially, however, the rule application is blocked when there is IP as in (22). The reason is cyclic Spell Out.

The IP in (22) is what is traditionally called the Irrealis (Mizen) or the Adverbial (Renyo) form to which functional morphemes suffix. In Japanese morphosyntax, when a constituent becomes a separable unit, it is a strong indication that it is syntactically and semantically discrete. From these considerations, I assume that the IP in (22) is a phase (Richards 2007, Collins and Stabler 2016) and is subject to cyclic Spell Out (Nunes and Uriagereka 2000). The derivations take the following steps. First, the CopulaP and the IP in (20) are built separately in the workspace and are merged. Second, crucially, the IP is Spelled Out first for CI/SM interfaces after the relevant relations such as binding of the empty category in spec, AP, are established. Once the IP is Spelled Out, it becomes inaccessible to the copula ar- that is Spelled Out later. In other words, k in the IP is not autosegmentally adjacent to any other phonological features at PF, and this prevents the M/P rule for voicing from applying. The VoiceP in the deadjectival -garu predicate in (14), on the contrary, is Spelled Out together with the CopulaP by one scoop. This is because the VoiceP is still a stem as far as the conjugation is concerned. Thus, it is not a discrete entity and therefore is not a phase. At PF, k is autosegmentally adjacent to ar-, thus the voicing occurs as expected.^{[19] , [20]}

A piece of supporting evidence for the structural differences comes from the asymmetry on extraction. When the DP neko no si “death of the cat” is extracted out of the adjectival predicate (22), the sentence becomes unacceptable.

On the contrary, the extraction of the same DP from the deadjectival -garu predicate (14) does not result in unacceptability.

The contrast on extraction stems from the ways the IP and the VoiceP are concatenated with the copula ar-. Recall that the IP in (22) has the Renyo (adverbial) conjugation. This suggests that the IP is concatenated with ar- as an adjunct for modification, and this explains why the extraction of the DP is impossible: Extraction out of an adjunct is banned universally. In (27), the DP neko no si “death of the cat” now functions as Major Subject and receives exhaustive listing interpretation (Kuno 1973), which is absurd.^[21] The VoiceP in (14) is not a strong phase and is concatenated with ar- as a complement. The extraction of the DP is possible because it is a type of scrambling which is commonly seen even in complex predicates in Japanese. Observe the sentences below where the Theme DP ninjin o “carrots Acc” is scrambled out.

The differences in the morphological integrity of the predicates also support this view. In Subject-Verb-Object (SOV) languages, functional heads line up on the right of a root, because the functional heads are suffixes. If something can intervene between functional heads that are lined up, that is a strong indication that these heads are divided into separable units as we have seen above where the IP in (22) is either the Irrealis (Mizen) or the Adverbial (Renyo) form. This predicts that the IP and ar- can be separated but the line of heads in -garu cannot be. This prediction is borne out; while a variety of morphemes such as the particles sae “even” or mo “also” could appear after the IP as in (29a), nothing intervenes the verbal predicate -garu as in (29b).

In (29b), V that is right adjacent to g is a hypothetical vowel position that would be necessary since CC hiatus /gs/ or /gm/ is not admissible in Japanese phonology. However, the CC hiatus is not the reason for the unacceptability. This is so because no matter what inflectional or a theme vowel (e.g., a, i, or u) is inserted in the position to save the predicate, the grammatical status of the sentence does not change. sae “even” and mo “also” can follow -garu only when the whole -garu is made to N in the light verb construction with suru “do.”^[22]

In other words, the “little” head k does not conjugate in [[√Root-k]^A/V -α] but α does (cf. TC). Similarly, according to our LPD analysis, -garu is inseparable not because it is a single morpheme, but because the VoiceP does not constitute a strong phase and cannot be Spelled Out alone.

In this section, I explored how deadjectival -garu and adjectival predicates are derived under LPD approach. In Section 4, I would like to discuss the etymology of k.

4.1 Point of view

A piece of supporting evidence for the verbal property of k comes from PoV. The -garu-derived deadjectival verbs puts a curious restriction on subject in that they are most felicitous with second- or third-person subjects (Hasebe 2014, Sugioka and Ito 2016). Observe the contrast below.

I propose that this condition on subjects stems from the grammatical function of k as an auxiliary verb. Note that adjectives of perception, sensation, and emotion describe the inner state of subjects that are by nature externally caused. That is, metaphorically speaking the stimuli “come” to one’s senses. This explains why in Japanese (32) is unacceptable.

In (32), the speaker reports that he/she physically moves closer to the place where he/she is at that time of utterance, an apparent absurdity. This means that the spatial and directional orientation of PoV is embodied in the verb. The grammaticalized k inherits this property and delimits subject in such a way that it can only describe psychological reactions to the incoming stimuli.^[24] This type of semantic orientation is not unusual crosslinguistically and could be seen, for instance, in the contrasts among the verbs of perception as in mi-ru “look,” mi-y-u “see,” and mi-s-u, “show,” or kik-u “listen,” kik-o-y-u “hear” and kik-a-s-u “make listen,” “control” in Japanese as well as in English.

An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the following is acceptable.

Here (31a) is embedded, but the sentence is acceptable. This is a very interesting case. I argue that (33) is not a counterexample but strengthens the analysis. The reason is that the PoV is shifted in (33) in such a way that the speaker objectifies himself/herself and reports the situation from the third-person PoV. Thus, the postulation of the grammaticalized k- “come” uniformly explains how both the adjectival and the -garu verbal predicates receive relevant interpretations. Next, let us turn our attention to the aspectual interpretation that k has, which supports the view that it is also “little” a.

4.2 Aspectual interpretation

Another piece of evidence for the origin of k comes from its aspectual use. It is known that k-o “come” was already grammaticalized in OJ and used to mean “bringing about a state” or “the continuation of a state” (Kogo Taikan II). Observe the following examples where k-i is the adverbial form of k-o.

In (34a), the writer laments and resigns how miserable his circumstances have become due to his exaltation. As the content suggests, the causal process or the path to the current state is at issue. (34b) describes the long period of time that the island has embraced the generations of travelers. In this use, the island works as a stative background in front of which generations of travelers have passed. What is of special interest to us is (34b), because the continuation of a state could be interpreted as a type of quantification. According to Parsons (1991: 194), “adjectives furnish predicates of individuals that, even in attributive position, are analyzable in terms of underlying quantification over states.” Following Parsons, I propose that k as “little” head evidences an abstract and underlying path on how an object comes to possess particular properties and quantifies them as a general state of it.^[25]

The complex feature makeup of verb k-o “come” makes it extremely useful and suited for grammaticalization in extending roots. It functions as “little” v due to its categorical specification as V. It also brings PoV into semantics. The aspectual and quantificational specifications allow it to function as “little” a. Even though verbs and adjectives are usually treated as separate both grammatically and semantically, the grammaticalized k-o “come” unifies them in a coherent manner that are described above. These uses of k-o have not changed in Modern Japanese.

5.1 The grammar of k

One of the important advantages of this view is that it could resolve the two conflicting views on k.

For instance, while Nishiyama (2005) argues k is an independent formative, Namai (2002) counterargues that it is an integral part of adjectival roots and inseparable.

(35) shows that bare adjectives cannot be coordinated. To do so, -ku needs to be attached to both adjectives as in (36). While Namai (2002) takes this to be a piece of evidence for -k(u) being an integral part of the adjective, Nishiyama (2005) counterargues that it is ungrammatical simply because taka is bound and cannot appear alone. Under our LPD approach, it is both: it is independent because it is “little” a, and it is a part of the root because roots need to be typed with a “little” head. Once typing is done, a root and its “little” head form an inseparable unit. (35) is ungrammatical because taka is a bare root and is not typed as A to be usable in syntax.^[26]

Similarly, Namai (2002: 345) points out the inability of the pro-form sou “so” to appear with (canonical) adjectives in (37a) and argues that it supports his view that such adjectives and -k(u) are inseparable. The problem does not appear with nominal adjectives as in (37b).

Nishiyama (2005: 141) argues that this is due to the idiosyncratic property of sou in that it has some restrictions as to what it could appear with. Under our analysis, in which k is “little” a, the ungrammaticality of (37a) is straightforwardly explained: k simply does not derive sou to A. (37b) is acceptable because de is a type of copula that takes N.^[27] As shown, our approach provides a natural solution to the disputed lexical status on k.

5.2 Adjectival modification and ambiguity

Another important issue discussed in Nishiyama (1999) and Namai (2002) is how adjectives modify nouns. Consider (38) where the adjective utukusi-i “beautiful” modifies the noun dansaa “dancer.”

The point is that (38) involves the tense marker -i, (i.e., our IP) that makes it indistinguishable between the attributive modification reading “a beautiful person who happens to be a dancer” and the relative clause reading “a dancer who happens to be beautiful.” Furthermore, it is said that there is an event reading “a dancer who dances beautifully.” How could this multiple ambiguity arise? Recall that in Section 3.4, we saw that the IP in adjectival predicates adjoins to CopulaP for modification. From this observation, I argue that (38) has the following structure.

The multiple interpretations arise in the following way. When the AP subject (ec) is coindexed with one, it is interpreted attributively as “a beautiful dancer” (a beautiful person who happens to be a dancer), but when it is coindexed with the whole N, it is interpreted as a relative clause “a dancer who is beautiful” (a dancer who happens to be beautiful). The event reading may arise because the root √dansu “dance” is homophonous between N and V. This is true even in the Japanese √odor-i ^N and √odor-u ^V. The noun √odor-i “dance” could be suffixed by te “hand” that works exactly like the English suffix -er does.

Predictably, the event reading does not arise with concrete and inanimate nouns such as isi “stone” as in utukusi-i isi “a beautiful stone.” As shown here, the multiple ambiguities that (38) exhibits are accounted for structurally in a very simple and natural manner. I argue that this is a strong piece of evidence that supports the general LPD approach that we undertake here.