Publication |Sophia Linguistica
Tatsuhiro Matsuda
Although it has been acknowledged since the early days of generative grammar that
Japanese has the resultative gapless relative clause (RGRC) while English does not
have this, it has not yet been provided with a conceptually and empirically adequate
account. This paper proposes that the free type-shifting operation of Takeda 1999 and
Causative Shift of Kratzer 2005 license the RGRC in Japanese, while English cannot
freely apply these operations and hence does not license an RGRC. This paper argues that
this difference between these two languages is guaranteed by the Generalized Blocking
Principle of Takeda 1999. Specifically, the fact that the Japanese lacks the determiner
while English has it ensures a free type-shifting operation, and this type-shifting assures
the application of Causative Shift. In so doing, this paper lends partial support to the
proposal of Takeda 1999 and Fukui 1999, 2008 that the Syntactic Object (SO) which is
licensed by the syntactic operation Agree in English is licensed in the semantic component
in Japanese because of the lack of Φ-features, features which induce Agree.