On the Apparent Complementizer in Japanese

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University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
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Saito, Hiroaki
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This paper investigates clausal complementation in Japanese, focusing on the particle tte. While tte appears to work as a complementizer, it shows distributional differences from the unmarked complementizer to. Based on the etymology of tte (it has developed from the combination of the speech verb iw ‘say’ and the complementizer to) and the cross-linguistic observation that grammaticalization of speech verbs is robustly found in languages with serial verb constructions, I suggest that tte involves a compound verb structure which consists of the speech verb iw ‘say’ and a verb of saying or thinking. The proposed analysis enables us to analyze tte as a cross-linguistically common pattern of grammaticalization; tte is in the process of the grammaticalization of a speech verb derived from serial/compound verb constructions.

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2023-01-01
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