Expressive Small Clauses in Japanese

摘要

This paper modifies and extends Potts and Roeper's (2006) analysis of what they call Expressive Small Clauses, simple uses of epithets such as You fool!, to analogous phrases in Japanese. The original Potts and Roeper analysis is unable to account for two puzzling characteristics of Japanese Expressive Small Clauses that are not shared with those in English: first, the use of a second person pronoun is not permitted in the Japanese counterparts, whereas many other forms of pronouns and non-pronominal nouns are available; second, something like "you fool" in Japanese can indeed occur as an argument of a sentence. Drawing on the recent syntactic literature on the morphological variation of the analogous nominal epithets, the paper proposes an account that explains the differences between English and Japanese Expressive Small Clauses.