John Whitman

The category of relative clauses in Japanese, with reference to Korean

Relative clauses in Japanese and Korean appear to represent a minimal contrast: modern Japanese lacks the affixal complementizers characteristic of adnominal clauses in Korean. The absence of overt complementizers has frequently been related to the hypothesis that adnominal clauses in Japanese have less structure than their counter-parts in languages with overt complementizers. This paper argues that the absence of an overt head in this specific case does not indicate the absence of a CP projection. The behavior of the copula in Japanese relative clauses and the distribution of the overt complementizerno both provide support for an analysis positing an empty complementizer position. At the same time, certain apparent peculiarities of relative operator movement in Japanese, in particular the clause-boundedness of adjunct relative operator movement, are also found in Korean and therefore cannot be attributed to the absence of a relative clause complementizer and its projection. These peculiarities reflect instead a general restriction on null operators which severely restricts their availability in relative clause structures, with the consequence that the adjunct relative clauses in question are in fact gapless.

The Vowels of Proto-Japanese

Vowel length has been reconstructed for pJ, based mainly on interpretinglow pitch in EMJ as reflecting pJ long vowels, supplemented with Ryukyuanevidence in the form of what seem to be primary long vowels. Vovin1993 offers additional external evidence. The precise role of this featurein changes between pJ and OJ is far from clear. Vowel length has beenproposed to have been a conditioning environment for certain soundchanges. For example, vowel raising only applying to short vowels (Hayata1998), or loss of *

Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan

The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with the hypothesis that agriculture spread north and east from the vicinity of Liaoning, beginning with the millets approximately 5500 BP. Wet rice agriculture in Korea and Japan results from a later spread, also beginning in Shandong, crossing via the Liaodong peninsula and reaching the Korean peninsula around 1500 BCE. This dispersal is associated with the Mumun archaeological culture after 1500 BCE in the Korean peninsula and the Yayoi culture after 950 BCE in the Japanese archipelago. From a linguistic standpoint, it is associated with the entry of the Japonic language family, first into the Korean peninsula, subsequently into the Japanese archipelago. The arrival of Koreanic is associated with the advent of the Korean-style bronze dagger culture and a temporary hiatus in wet rice agriculture sites around 300 BCE. Both Koreanic and Japonic are relatively shallow language families, with Koreanic the shallower of the two, consistent with the chronology above. The gap between the earliest linguistically motivated dates for these language families and the archaeological events is the result of a linguistic founders effect, providing further evidence for demic diffusion as a source for their distribution.

Argument Positions and Configurationality

Jelinek (1984) presents the hypothesis that in languages with a certain set of typological properties, argument positions are realized where bound person markers appear.