Philosophy

It is generally acknowledged that Japanese has two kinds of passives, direct passives and indirect passives. We have argued in another paper that direct passives involve an existential quantification and decrease the number of the arguments by one. In the present paper, we claim that a new argument is added to the predicate in indirect passives. Though the indirect passive of an intransitive verb is simply an operation of adding a new argument, in the case of the indirect passive of a transitive verb, this operation is usually coupled with the existential quantification which is found in direct passives, and hence there is no change in the number of the arguments. We also claim that the indirectness of indirect passives consists in that the newly added argument expresses the indirect theme of the reported event, which has some close relation with an element of the same event denoted by the old argument.

As was argued in the preceding paper ([Iida 2012]), typically a new argument is introduced as "indirect theme" in Japanese indirect passive. In order to explicate the nature of a relation between the newly introduced argument and the old arguments, we undertake a systematic study of relational nouns in Japanese. In the present part, we concentrate on relational nouns that express kinship and other social relations. A relational noun is a noun which takes an argument, and is an "unsaturated" expression in Fregean sense. Relational nouns, however, may give rise to some "saturated" expressions which are not relational. They are (i) nouns which express relationships themselves, (ii) relational nouns used "absolutely", and (iii) relational nouns used as classificatory labels. 1 In the case of indirect passive coming from intransitive verbs, there are no corresponding cases to the second and third types, as the following examples show.

This paper is concerned with an issue in the ontology of language. The question we wish to ask is this, namely, given that a language consists of linguistic types which are abstract objects, and that abstract objects do not exist in time, how is it possible for a language to change?
We start with drawing a distinction between linguistic types and tokens (§1). Then, in §2 it will be argued that linguistic types are contingent abstract objects. After trying to locate linguistic types among various type entities in §3, we note that the ontological status of linguistic types has an important epistemological consequence that we have a posteriori knowledge of abstract objects such as linguistic types, because we come to know their properties by encountering their tokens in our experience (§4). If a language is a system of abstract objects, then it does not exist in time, and hence, it cannot change. But, we talk of a language as if it is constantly changing. How can such contradictory claims be reconciled? This is the main question of this paper and the business of §5 is to try to answer it. In answering it, we propose to make two corrections to our way of talking about language. First, “language change” is, in reality, a replacement of one language by another. Strictly speaking, languages cannot change; only linguistic practices change. Second, language names such as “Japanese,” “French,” or even “first-order language” are not singular names but common names. We should admit there are a great number of different languages which are all called “Japanese.”

This paper is about geometrical shapes and our knowledge of them. My interest in this subject comes from my work on the ontology and epistemology of linguistic types and tokens (Iida 2009). We see the linguistic entities like alphabets and Chinese characters in two different ways. Usually we see them as types, but sometimes we see them as tokens. I think it a very significant fact that linguistic entities sometimes appear as abstract entities in the form of types, and they sometimes appear as concrete objects or events in the form of tokens. For, our recognition and handling of the linguistic entities show that we have a capacity to recognize and handle abstract entities in concrete situations.

There are some objects of perception that are either too far from us to touch or that cannot be touched at all. Typical examples are the sky and the various phenomena that appear in the sky such as rainbows and sunsets. This paper is concerned with the ontological status of the rainbow. Does it exist when it is not actually perceived? Does it exist even when it is not possibly perceived? My conclusion is that a rainbow is a physical event, and that, although it is recognized as a rainbow by its characteristic visual appearance, it should not be identied with that appearance. I suggest that the case of the rainbow might give us useful hints for the analysis of secondary qualities like colors and sounds.

A semantical analysis of a Japanese verbal suffix "(rar)e" is given in the framework of event semantics. It is claimed that the primary sense of "(rar)e" is that of situational and volitional possibility. This sense is analyzed in terms of the concept of possible stages of history during a given time interval and the thematic role of agent. The other two senses of "(rar)e" are shown to be derivable from the primary sense. It is observed that the ability sense of "(rar)e" appears when it is used in an attribute sentence, and an analysis of a certain class of attribute sentences is given, which shows they are essentially generic sentences and hence, the predicate with "(rar)e" expressing ability is a generic predicate. Finally, the reason why "(rar)e" expresses a realized possibility in certain contexts are explained by the interaction of the primary sense of "(rar)e" and perfective aspect. Throughout, it is emphasized that the basic classification of Japanese sentences into states of affairs sentences and attribute sentences is essential for giving the semantical account of Japanese predicates.

In the previous installment of this paper [Iida 2013], it was claimed that a relational noun is a noun which takes an argument. Now we start looking at the various ways of such argument-taking. The argument place of a relational noun is filled by either explicit binding or implicit binding. In the following sections, we will discuss explicit argument binding by means of a definite or bare indefinite noun phrase. The topics that will be discussed are: the interaction between the conjoining particle "to" and the possessive (genitive) particle "no", the comparison of scopal difference with distributive/non-distributive distinction, and the interplay between a relational noun and plurality in general.

The recent development of plural logic has been a good news for a student of the semantics of a language like Japanese which has no systematic distinction between singular and plural. But plural logic is applicable only to countable predicates; it is not applicable to non-countable predicates. Thus, the first question that must be settled before we may apply plural logic to Japanese is to make sure that it has countable predicates.