A Study of Syntactic and Discourse Phenomena in Japanese by Kiyoharu OnoReview by: Chris BrockettThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Apr., 1995), pp. 41-44Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489411 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE I 41

REVIEWS

A STUDY OF SYNTACTIC AND DISCOURSE PHENOMENA IN JAPANESE, by Kiyoharu Ono. Sydney, Australia: Eramboo Press, 1992.

Pp xvii + 283. Aus $45.00/US $30.00 (paper). Reviewed by

Chris Brockett

This collection of papers written by Ono between 1984 and 1991 consists of two unequal parts, the first and longer treating syntactic issues, such as quantifier float, case marking, and argument structure, and the second and shorter section, the discourse-related topics of unagi-bun and benefactive and directional verbs. The two discourse papers are more

recently written than the syntax papers. Although Ono states in his introduction that the papers were "revised and edited" for the volume, the reader will wish that he had been able to benefit from more substantive editorial advice, and had taken the opportunity to revise his writings in light of recent work, especially Miyagawa's discussion of quantifier float (1989), of which Ono appears to be unaware.

It is perhaps the fourth chapter (entitled "Case Marking in Japanese: An Introduction to Percolation Grammar") that best exemplifies what has gone wrong with this volume. Working broadly within the framework of

Chomsky's 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding, Ono proposes to

augment the inventory of Empty Categories with a new class of category that he terms 'invisible trace,' purportedly distinct from NP trace, to account for complex predicate structures such as causatives and -te aru. The term 'invisible trace' is itself problematic, since all traces, not having overt

phonological content, are by definition invisible anyway. To make matters worse, 'invisible trace' is left by what Ono terms 'NP percolation,' allegedly an instance of Move a, that he describes as follows: "if an embedded clause S is Chomsky-adjoined to a matrix NP with Case but no 0-role, the embedded NP with a 0-role most immediately dominated by the S

percolates to the matrix NP-node and inherits Case from it" (p. 103).

This statement will be almost unintelligible even to syntacticians, and for good reason. It seems that Ono idiosyncratically analyses a sentence such as mado ga akete aru as having the structure [S [NP madoi-ga [S PRO ti ake]]

[vp-te aru]], in which -te aru is analyzed as the matrix verb, and the noun mado is taken to be the head of a complex NP with [S PRO e akete] as its

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42 I VOLUME 29, NUMBER 1

complement (see the tree on p. 120). This treatment violates nearly every standard generative (and non-generative!) assumption concerning both

constituency and head direction in Japanese, yet Ono presents no

arguments in favor of his analysis over other more plausible contenders,

including, for example, [S[NP mado-ga] [VP[ t akete-aru]]], where -te aru has undergone reanalysis as a pseudo-passive morphology. Ono extends his curious analysis to causatives, resulting in some remarkable-looking trees, such as the following:

S

NP-ga VP

V'I Taroo VI

NP V

NP-o S -saseta

[e] [~i Hanako-ga hatarak

I (t)

It appears that Ono is trying to claim that NPs, but not, say, VPs, can be

complements. But in the absence of the argumentation necessary to posit such an extraordinary structure, the reader has scant option but to reject Ono's hypothesis. There are terminological problems, too: the label 'percolation' is standardly employed in the generative literature to refer to the transfer of features along a path in an X-bar structure: it is impossible to see how Ono's 'percolation,' purportedly an instance of Move-a, differs

significantly from garden-variety NP movement. The field of linguistics does not progress by weaving theories out of thin air, but by constructing or

modifying theories on the basis of consistent argumentation rooted in a

body of evidence; yet the reader will not find such theoretical motivation in this volume.

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JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF JAPANESE I 43

Other sections of the book fare marginally better. In the first chapter, Ono observes (correctly) that grammatical relations rather than case relations determine whether or not a quantifier can be floated, in which respect he

anticipates Miyagawa 1989. Yet his results are inconclusive and far less

theoretically interesting than, for example, those of Miyagawa. If "ga/ni conversion" and quantifier float are mutually exclusive, as Ono observes, then surely the key question is to determine what principles should compel their mutual exclusiveness. But Ono does not take this next step.

Ono also discusses Saito's seminal analysis of case-marking (Saito 1982, 1983, 1985), arguing against his "discrete and monolithic" case system (p. 96). Although Saito's treatment is by no means the last word on the subject (and his two early papers remain regrettably unpublished), Ono's

counterarguments come across as inconsequential and the data often

underanalyzed. Sensei-gata ni wa zenin go-sooken no yosi, o-yorokobi moosi-

agemasu, for instance, is probably not, as Ono suggests, an example of

quantifier float from either a non-nominal subject or an indirect object; the sentence must surely be analyzed as containing an embedded clause with a structure along the lines of [CPfIP pro zen'in gosooken 0 (=da)] no] in which zenin quantifies the Empty Category subject of the clause, coindexed with

sensei-gata ni wa, which is in turn predicated of zen 'in go-sooken noyosi' In terms of contribution to Japanese linguistics, perhaps the most

successful of the chapters is the last, in which Ono presents interesting results of questionnaires concerning the behavior of benefactive verbs (yaru, kureru, etc.) and directional verbs (iku, kuru) in direct and indirect discourse. Regrettably, this chapter would have been well served by editing to make the prose more comprehensible and less repetitive.

Reading this collection in 1994 is a frustrating experience. Although one finds occasional insights, much of the work is dated (Ono uses Kuno far too often as a straw man) or superseded without the compensatory merit of

having historical interest or affording access to useful but otherwise inaccessible papers. The argumentation and analyses that Ono presents are

frequently weak, and, less forgivably, sometimes play fast and loose with key concepts in generative linguistic theory in ways that contribute little either to the development of syntactic models or our understanding of Japanese.

Publication of this volume was supported by the Japan Foundation. The

Japan Foundation might do well in future to ensure that generative linguists advise on the merits of any publication projects bearing on that field.

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44 I VOLUME 29, NUMBER 1

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris.

Miyagawa, Shigeru. 1989. Structure & Case Marking in Japanese. Stephen L. Anderson (ed.). Syntax and Semantics 22. Academic Press.

Saito, Mamoru. 1982. Case Marking in Japanese: A Preliminary Study. Saito, Mamoru. 1983. Case and Government in Japanese. Ms.

Saito, Mamoru. 1985. Some Asymmetries in Japanese and their Theoretical

Consequences. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT.

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