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Thetics and Categoricals
Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 262] 2020
► pp. 337–350

B-grade subjects and theticity

| Keio University

This study investigates the linguistic subject in categorical and thetic sentences. In the “subjectless” thetic sentence, as Kuroda (1972) pointed out, we have a nonprototypical subject, a B-grade subject, which is preferably combined in Japanese with the nominative marker ga. By contrasting B-grade subjects in Japanese with their corresponding expressions in German (and other languages), we discover two types of subjects, internal and external. In Japanese, B-grade subjects are realizations of internal subjects, which are verbalized differently in other languages as a subject, as a dummy subject, or an object. Comparing different realization forms of weather expressions crosslinguistically, we suggest that the language-specific realizations of B-grade subjects correspond to three types of thetic judgments: entity-central, event-central, and mixed type of both.

Keywords: subjecthood, thetic judgment, categorical judgment, Japanese, German, topic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Thetic and categorical judgments
  • 3.“B-grade subjects” in Onoe (2017)
  • 4.B-grade-subjects in German?
  • 5.Restriction on the specific indefinite subject
  • 6.Two types of Theticity: Entity-central and event-central
  • 7.Discussion: Crosslinguistic realization forms of the B-grade subjects with examples from weather verbs
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.262.12tan
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Abraham, Werner
2020. From philosophical logic to linguistics. In Thetics and Categoricals [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 262], ► pp. 226 ff. DOI logo
Abraham, Werner
2020. Introduction . In Thetics and Categoricals [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 262], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo

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