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Thetics and Categoricals
Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 262] 2020
► pp. 283–310

Pseudocategorical or purely thetic?

A contrastive case study of how thetic statements are expressed in Japanese, English, and German

| Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
According to Marty (1918), thetic statements differ from categorical ones in making a simple existential recognition or rejection rather than a predication. In Japanese, where two subject particles, ga and wa, are presumably available for this differentiation (Kuroda 1972), the point can be expounded especially by the fact that da ‘to be’ hardly appears as an existential verb in ga-marked, but only in wa-marked sentences. Moreover, the same holds true for German optatives. I conclude from these observations that thetic statements find their expression not only pseudocategorically, as originally assumed by Marty (1918), but also in a purely thetic manner in natural languages, provided (at least) there is no personal deictic agreement at work between a syntactic subject and a syntactic predicate.
Keywords: predication, existential recognition or rejection, negation, personal agreement, VP-external subject
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Categorical,” “thetic,” and “pseudocategorical” after Marty (1918)
    • 2.1Categorical statements
    • 2.2Thetic statements
    • 2.3Pseudocategorical sentences
  • 3. Ga-sentences and SA-sentences as expressions of thetic statements
    • 3.1 Ga- as opposed to wa-sentences in Japanese
    • 3.2SA- vs. non-SA-sentences in English and German
  • 4.Where does pure theticity come from?
  • 5.Optative – A purely thetic expression in German
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.262.10fuj
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Isaka, Yukari
2020. Infinitive constructions and theticity in German. In Thetics and Categoricals [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 262], ► pp. 144 ff. DOI logo

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