Acknowledgment for the JK 13 paper

Many people have helped me shape the idea presented in this paper. The two individuals to whom I am most deeply indebted in this particular regard are Yuki Kuroda and Satoshi Kinsui.

As noted in the paper, the analysis pursued here is an attempt to articulate and slightly modify the proposal in Kuroda 1979. Furthermore, it was Yuki Kuroda who first pointed out to me in the late 1980s that the movement involved in the niyotte passive might be an instance of scrambling. In the subsequent years when I reminded him of this on a few occasions, however, he did not remember it, and hence I do not know whether he would agree with the analysis presented in this paper.

In the late 1980s, I was working fairly intensively on reconstruction effects in Japanese as part of a larger paradigm of bound variable anaphora in Japanese. But that was several years before we had Ueyams's (1998) theory and the relevant empirical paradigms in support of it; and mainly for that reason, it was not possible to attain a high level of repeatability in regard to the predicted contrasts under the hypothesis that should/could have been pursued. As it turned out, I had to wait until after I had finished Hoji 2003 (the Lingua "Falsifiability" paper) to work on the Japanese passives.

One of the things that kept my interest in Japanese passives was the thesis (presented in its essentials in Matsushita 1930, according to Kinsui 1997) and defended in Kinsui 1997 in more specific terms that "[n]iyotte passive sentences happened to come into the Japanese language when the translation word niyotte expressing means and way, was assigned to Dutch door—a marker of path, means and way and of the agent in a passive sentence—in the literal translation of Modern Dutch texts." (Kinsui 1997: abstract) If the movement involved in the niyotte-passive were an instance of A-movement, as I initially (i.e., in the late 1980s) thought, the introduction of the niyotte-passive into Japanese in the early to mid 19th century could be understood as an introduction of some element in Japanese that would result in A-movement, being accompanied by, or as the result of, the introduction of the use of niyotte noted above. However, if a defining property of the Japanese language is the complete absence of formal agreement features (or whatever formal properties that are responsible for obligatory 'displacement' of an element, e.g., active functional categories in the terms of N. Fukui's works), as I came to believe in the mid 1990s (shortly after or around Hoji 1995 (NELS), I think), the A-movement account of the niyotte-passive is difficult to maintain.

Given that the movement in the niyotte-passive is not an instance of A-movement, two possibilities come to mind as to the nature of the 'historical change' noted above. One is that the introduction of the agentive NP-niyotte was accompanied by, or triggered, the introduction of the argument-reducing use of -rare on the basis of the analogy of the intransitivizing suffix such as -e in war-e '(something) break', as opposed to war 'break (something)'. Such a view would be supported if the subject of the passive sentences in Japanese, until the introduction of the niyotte-passive, always had to be an NP that expresses an experiencer/affectee theta role, as would be expected under the view that the only Japanese passive available until then was with the argument-taking -rare. As discussed in Kinsui 1997, however, it seems that there were passives in Japanese whose subject NPs do not express an experiencer/affectee theta role, before the introduction of the niyotte-passive.

Although the JK 13 paper does not address the nature of the 'historical change' in question—neither did I discuss it in my JK 13 presentation although the relevant discussion had been included in an earlier draft of the JK 13 talk and also in the presentation at the UCLA workshop in February, 2003—I would like to maintain, following (the essentials of) Kinsui 1997, that the only change that took place is the introduction of the use of NP-niyotte as expressing an agent (in the passive sentence), and that the argument-reducing -rare was in the Japanese lexicon before the 'historical change' in question took place, along with the other intransitivizing suffixes. (According to Satoshi Kinsui (p.c., February, 2003), the essentials of this view are found in earlier literature by some traditional grammarians. He has kindly provided me with information on the relevant references, which I will try to present on a separate occasion.) A more complete description of the passive with the argument-reducing -rare and the unaccusatives would have to make reference to the 'control properties' of the 'suppressed external argument' in the case of the former and not in the case of the latter, but I will not get into that here. (Thanks to Yuki Takubo (p.c., December 2003) for reminding me of this point.) Assuming that the agentive NP-ni always signals the subject argument of the embedded VP without tense, and hence the use of the agentive NP-ni in a passive sentence necessarily means the use of the argument-taking -rare, which takes an NP and a VP as its arguments, we would now take the position that before the introduction of the NP-niyotte as expressing an agent (in the passive sentence), the passive with the argument-reducing -rare was expressed without the agent overtly expressed. This seems to be basically in accord with what is discussed in Kinsui 1997, and is the second possibility that comes to mind in regard to the nature of the historical change in question.

An earlier version of the analysis in the paper was presented in my graduate syntax course at USC in the spring of 2003 and at a workshop at UCLA, February, 2003. It was during the latter that I came to take the view I do in regard to the historical change noted in the preceding paragraph, and I thank the participants there, especially Satoshi Kinsui, for their help. (Had I read Kinsui 1997 more carefully and understood it better, I would perhaps not have taken the detour that I did.) Yongjoon Cho and Seonkyung Jeon helped me begin to understand passives in Korean in the graduate course at USC, but my understanding is still very much at a preliminary stage and I can only hope that I will someday be able to discuss Korean passives, and acknowledge their contribution in a more concrete way.

Starting with the preparation of the JK 13 presentation and all the way through the very last stage of the preparation of the paper, Teru Fukaya and Ayumi Ueyama have offered generous support, without which I would not have finished the paper. Teru Fukaya has gone through a countless number of drafts of the paper and gave me detailed comments on every single version, which resulted in much improvement. At the last stage of the conference presentation as well as that of the writing of the paper, Ayumi Ueyama provided me comments that were instrumental in putting the materials in 14 pages, saving the paper from becoming totally unreadable. I have also benefited from comments and questions from Yukiko Tsuboi, Kiyoko Kataoka, and Yuki Takubo at various stages.

Shortly before the JK 13 presentation, Satoshi Kinsui and Yuki Takubo gave me comments on the draft version of the presentation that they kindly allowed me to present. I would like to thank their helpful comments although most of their comments were not incorporated in the actual JK presentation because of the radical reorganization within less than 24 hours before the presentation, or in the present paper. Right after the JK presentation, Bill McClure gave me insightful and thoughtful comments. Since his comments were on the methodological aspects of my JK presentation (see Discuss-Passive[14027]), however, they are not reflected on the present paper.

I would also like to thank J.-R. Hayashishita for discussion on the reconstruction paradigms of passives in Japanese and the raising construction in English and Hagit Borer for being critical over the years of the view that the raising construction in English does not exhibit (genuine) reconstruction effects. Ringe (Hayashishita)'s quantifier scope paradigms, with and without resumption, have given me confidence that the contrast I had been trying to establish about Japanese passive sentences is indeed a reflection of something grammatical. The space limit certainly did not help me present compelling arguments that would convince Hagit of my view on A-reconstruction (in English). The relevant arguments would have to address empirical as well as methodological issues. Empirically, they would have to address the nature of quirky binding (see Ueyama 1998, Ueyama 2002: 2.2.2, and Hoji 2003: 2.2.2.2) and how it may manifest itself in English, in relation to notions such as salience, as well as issues of A-reconstruction having to do with anaphor-binding and cases involving X⁰ categories. Methodologically, we would have to consider how the notion of a minimal pair is commonly understood and made use of in the field, and what I believe to be the crucial aspect of the minimal pair from the view point of putting our hypothesis to severe tests, in relation to notions such as negative predictions, and negative propositions; see section 1 of my JK 13 handout posted in Discuss-Passive[13660] and the discussion under the thread there.

The research reported here has been supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 15320052, Theoretical and empirical studies of reference and anaphora.

The regular disclaimers apply.