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Part of
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman
Edited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 3–22

Chapter 1
On complement selection in Spanish and Japanese

| International Christian University

This paper focuses on some curious parallelism between Spanish and Japanese. In particular, it shows that complement clause selection in these languages can be captured by the semantic categories proposed by Lahiri (1991, 2002). It demonstrates that these two languages obey the exact same constraints on complement selection by examining Japanese data along the lines of Lahiri’s verbal classification. It also shows that the analysis of Japanese complementizers proposed by Saito (2010) should be extended to account for a wider range of Japanese data. This extended analysis is shown to be able to capture all the shared parallelisms between the two languages.

Keywords: complement selection, semantic category, utterance, proposition, question, complementizer
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complementizers in Japanese
  • 3.Saito’s account for the C-comp -(no)-ka-to
  • 4.Verb classification based on semantic categories
    • 4.1 Lahiri (2002)
    • 4.2Class I verbs
    • 4.3Class II verbs
    • 4.4Class III verbs
    • 4.5Class IV verbs
    • 4.6Class V verbs
    • 4.7Class VI verbs
  • 5.Further parallelisms
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.250.02yos
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