Japanese Causatives are Not Relevant To Lexical Integrity

Blocking and Japanese Causatives

A principle is proposed that organizes verbs in the lexicon according to their meaning and the number of arguments they require. This principle, which we call the Paradigmatic Structure, acts as a filter for the permanent lexicon, letting all verb stems into the lexicon but only some morphological derivatives. The effects of the Paradigmatic Structure are observed in blocking, in which some but...

A Pregroup Analysis of Japanese Causatives

We explore a computational algebraic approach to grammar via pregroups. We examine how the structures of Japanese causatives can be treated in the framework of a pregroup grammar. In our grammar, the dictionary assigns one or more syntactic types to each word and the grammar rules are used to infer types to strings of words. We developed a practical parser representing our pregroup grammar, whi...

On the Acquisition of Causatives in Japanese

In studies of the acquisition of Japanese causatives, it has been reported that the morpheme –(s)ase is used at a relatively early period and at this point children can create sentences that have biclausal structures. However, if we closely look at the interpretation of the early utterances of causative sentences, we find that they are lexical causatives not syntactic causatives. Accordingly, w...

Sase Bizarre: the Structure of Japanese Causatives

In this paper, I present a unified treatment of the three different types of Japanese causatives, the -ni causative, the -o causative and the lexical causative, which relies on a notion of “Late Insertion” of lexical items, as proposed in Halle and Marantz (1993). Crucially, all three are claimed to contain a “CAUSE” morpheme which is spelled out as saseat PF. This morpheme is the reflex of a l...

Child Causatives: Acquisition of Bi-clausal Structures in Japanese