In addition to Yo Matsumoto’s work, there is quite a bit of relevant work on Japanese by Stanford PhDs, including Masayo Iida, Shuichi Yatabe, Mariko Saiki, Megumi Kameyama, and Akita Ishikawa. You might also consult Peter Sells.
IIRC the Bresnan et al LFG textbook of 2015 also has informative problems from Japanese based on some of the work by the authors above.
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 4:24 AM Jay Chin Soto jay.chinsoto@wolfson.ox.ac.uk wrote:
Dear LFG List,
As per Internet forum custom, I will get straight to the point (niceties will be in the P.S.)
I have 2 questions I hope you can help me with.
- Is there any literature on the treatment of Japanese in LFG? I can
locate isolated examples, but nothing extensive.
- I have two Japanese sentences: "Watashi ga keeki ga hoshii" (I want
cake.) and "Watashi ga keeki wo hoshigatteiru." (I appear to want cake." In the first sentence, the particle "ga" marks the object because the function "hoshii" is of a certain word class (called keiyoushi) and in the second sentence, the auxiliary -gatteiru has been added to the morpheme "hoshi" (same as before) to turn it into another world class (a verb) where objects are marked with "wo". It is unclear to me where in LFG you would connect particle assignment of arguments based on word class. This cannot be quirky case because all transitive keiyoushi and verbs work this way.
For this second question, because I know it's hefty, all I'm looking for honestly is a nudge in the right direction.
Thank you for your time, Jay S. Chin
P.S.
I am not necessarily "new" to LFG, but I have started to research it more seriously. One of the things that makes LFG attractive to me is that there is no movement at c-structure. A lot of phenomena in Japanese will be accounted for with movement in minimalism and transformational grammars, but LFG's i-structure can account for some of that (e.g. whether it's a topic or a focus), but *how* arguments get their particles in Japanese is very unclear to me at this point.
I really do appreciate everybody's time and attention; and I'm looking forward to learning from you now and in the future.