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Thetics and Categoricals
Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 262] 2020
► pp. 179–198

Adjectives and mode of expression

Psych-adjectives in attributive and predicative usage and implications for the thetic/categorical discussion

| Waseda University
The German psych-adjectives glücklich (happy) and traurig (sad) and their Japanese counterparts shiawase and kanashii are considered here with regard to their semantics, the hierarchy of thematic roles, and the mode of expression. The attributive usage has a semantic structure with broad focus on the entire structure, which shows a similarity to thetic judgments despite its nonpropositional status. By contrast, the predicative usage with the subject/topic as the stimulus denotes a permanent property of the entity evoking the emotion and consists of two components respectively with narrow focus, which corresponds to the double judgment of categoricals. This structure is possible owing to the property of the copulative predication that it gives the sentence definiteness, but does not give any semantic role to the arguments.
Keywords: argument structure, attribution, broad focus, copulative predication, individual-level, narrow focus, predication, predication force, psych-adjective, stage-level
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Attributive usage
    • 2.2Predicative usage
  • 3.Mode of expression and semantics
    • 3.1Contradiction with polysemy theory
    • 3.2Attribution and predication
    • 3.3Types of predication
    • 3.4Reorganization of the semantic structure
    • 3.5Implications for the thetic-categorical discussion
  • 4.Summary and prospects
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.262.07mur
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