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John Whitman

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Papers by John Whitman

The Syntax of CP and V-2 in Early Child German (ECG) The Strong Continuity Hypothesis

North East Linguistics Society, 1992

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A comparative approach to the vowel systems and harmonies in the Transeurasian languages and beyond

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages, 2020

In this chapter the standard treatments of the Transeurasian vowel correspondences are reviewed, ... more In this chapter the standard treatments of the Transeurasian vowel correspondences are reviewed, including their reconstructions of hypothetical proto-inventories, for the purpose of establishing a description of the Transeurasian vowel inventory and vowel harmony type. The review commences with a comparison of two major types of vowel-harmony systems in the Transeurasian languages, i.e. the palatal vs. the tongue-root harmony systems, and presents phonetic, phonological, and comparative evidence for a tongue-root harmony analysis of Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic. Interpretations of the main Transeurasian reconstructions are then proposed, such as Ramstedt (1952–66) and Poppe (1960b) according to tongue-root harmony analysis as opposed to the conventional palatal harmony analysis. After this, there is an effort to situate the Transeurasian vowel inventory in its typological and geographical neighborhood, including Northeast Asian languages and beyond, and in its linguistic geograph...

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Korean

Korean, 2019

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Neural correlates of semantic number: A cross-linguistic investigation

One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom a speaker ... more One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom a speaker is referring to. While previous work has documented the neural correlates of general number comprehension and quantity comparison, we investigate semantic number from a cross-linguistic perspective with the goal of identifying cortical regions involved in distinguishing plural from singular nouns. We use three fMRI datasets in which Chinese, French, and English native speakers listen to an audiobook of a children’s story in their native language. We select these three languages because they differ in their number semantics. While Chinese lacks nominal pluralization, French and English nouns are overtly marked for number. We find a number of known semantic processing regions in common, including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the pars orbitalis, in which cortical activation is greater for plural than singular nouns and posit a cross-linguistic role for number in semantic comprehension.

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John Whitman

1. Introduction The relegation of syntactic variation to lexical features under the Minimalist Pr... more 1. Introduction The relegation of syntactic variation to lexical features under the Minimalist Program has led to a growing awareness that syntactic change should be characterized in the same way: by changes in the discrete features of individual lexical items. This insight has given rise to the following distinctively minimalist typology of syntactic change: (1) a. Loss or gain of a feature driving movement (Roberts 1993, 1997). b. Grammaticalization as shift " up the tree " to a functional category (Roberts & Roussou 1999) c. Reanalysis as relabelling: lexical items change categorial or projection [+max, +min] features under preservation of hierarchical (c-command) relations (Whitman 2000). The objective of this paper is to apply this typology to several well-known examples of syntactic change in Chinese. We show that earlier analyses exaggerate the scope of syntactic change in the long-documented history of Chinese languages. The changes that are in fact attested can be...

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Shi ... de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese 1

The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct construc... more The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi...de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi...de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from itor pseudo-clefts in languages like English. The crucial distinguishing property of shi...de clefts is that they involve no A' movement. This is linked to the fact that the presupposition in the shi...de focus cleft involves a projection smaller than CP. It thus lacks a landing site for A' movement and fails to host material such as negation, normally compatible with full CP clefts in languages such as English. The Mandarin pattern shows that the basic semantic property of clefts, bipartioning into focus and presupposition, is logically independent from A' movement.

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Syntactic Change in Chinese and the Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry

The word order in Chinese has always been SVO, from the earliest attested documents (14-11 c. BC)... more The word order in Chinese has always been SVO, from the earliest attested documents (14-11 c. BC) up to Modern Mandarin. Examined carefully, the observed SOV cases in pre-Archaic Chinese turn out to either involve focalization of the object or object pronouns in the context of negation. Importantly, both structures observe head-complement order, i.e. a pattern consistent with VO. This removes any coherent basis for the claim that pre-Archaic Chinese was a SOV language. Against this background of stable VO order, important changes can, however, be observed for the distribution of adjunct phrases, from both preand postverbal position in pre-Archaic Chinese to exclusively preverbal position in Modern Mandarin, reflecting changes in the format of the vP.

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A Korean Grammatical Borrowing in Early Middle Japanese Kunten Texts and its Relation to the Syntactic Alignment of Earlier Korean and Japanese

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Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis

This paper argues that syntactic misparsing is not a significant factor in syntactic change, cont... more This paper argues that syntactic misparsing is not a significant factor in syntactic change, contrary to many earlier claims. It examines the best known examples in the literature of syntactic change resulting from alleged misparsing, and shows that the misparsing analysis is rejected in the most current research, or at best subject to alternative explanations. Cases discussed include SVO word order in Niger-Congo, the Chinese bǎ construction, and English for NP to VP infinitives. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of the roles of misparsing, broadly construed, in syntactic and phonological change.

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The source of the bigrade conjugation and stem shape in pre-Old Japanese

Proto-Japanese, 2008

Hifu o saku to kizu ga hukaku naru. skin ACC split when wound NOM deep becomes 'When one splits t... more Hifu o saku to kizu ga hukaku naru. skin ACC split when wound NOM deep becomes 'When one splits the skin, the wound gets deeper.' In (2), the vowel-stem verb is transitive, and the consonant-stem verb is transitive. This is the opposite of the situation in (1). This basic state of affairs-the existence of two main conjugation classes, the presence of formally similar stems in both conjugations, related by transitivity, and the unpredictability of the transitivity relation-has a very old history in Japanese. It obtains in the oldest attested variety, Old Japanese, as shown in (3) and (4): (3) a. ta=kwomura ni amu kak-i tuk-i hand=wrist on horsefly hang-RY attach-RY 'a horsefly bit (him) on the forearm and...' (Kojiki Yûryaku, 712) b. yo no naka ni kokoro tuk-e-zu-te world GEN midst in heart put-MZ-noting 'without paying heed to the affairs of the world' (MYS 4162, 746-757) (4) a. ipa sak-u rock split-SS/RT 'splits rock.' (Nihon shoki Jindai 2, 720, phonetic note explaining name of god) b. (tume) sake -te nail split-RY-ing 'the nail splits and...' (Nihon ryôiki 2.26, 822) THE BIGRADE CONJUGATION AND STEM SHAPE IN PRE-OLD JAPANESE 4 Pre-OJ *oki-u *oko-i *oko-i *oko-uru *oko-urai *oki-yo Lower Bigrade aku 'dawn' ake ake akuru akure akeyo Pre-OJ *ake-u *aka-i *aka-i *aka-uru *aka-urai *ake-y Monograde miru 'sees' mi mi miru mire miyo Pre-OJ *mi-ru *mi-i *mi-i *mi-ru *mi-rai *mi-yo

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Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2008

Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese 1.1 Pre-and post-verbal negation in OV languages. Dahl ... more Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese 1.1 Pre-and post-verbal negation in OV languages. Dahl (1979) (see also Dryer 1988, 1992) observes that SOV languages evince two typical negation patterns: one where the marker of negation immediately precedes the verb, and one where it follows. Inflected negative markers appear in the latter pattern; preverbal negators are uninflected particles. These two patterns are shown in (1-2) with examples from Korean and Japanese. (1) Preverbal Negation a. Mica ka hakkyo ey an ka-ss-ta. (Korean) Mica NOM school to NEG go-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' b. Tuki na mi-tamaΦ-i so! (Japanese; Taketori Monogatari 859) moon NEG see-HONORIFIC-CONTINUATIVE PRT 'Please don't look at the moon!' (2) Postverbal Negation a. Mica ka hakkyo ey ka-ci anh-ass-ta. (Korean) Mica NOM school to go-SUSP NEG-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' b. Yooko ga gakkoo ni ik-ana-katta koto (Japanese) Yôko NOM school to go-NEG-PAST that 'that Yôko didn't go to school.' Pas has the properties of a maximal projection: it does not block movement of the verb. Ne is analyzed by Pollock as a clitic, which moves with the verb to Tense. (3) [ TP Paul [ T' ne mange [ NegP pas t ne [ VP t V ]]]]. "Paul doesn't eat." Like ne, the post verbal negators anh-(2a) and-ana-(2b) are heads. Korean anh-is inflected for tense and selects a verbal complement in suspective-ci. It may optionally assign overt case to this complement (Song 1971): (4) Mica ka hakkyo ey ka-ci lul anh-ass-ta. Mica NOM school to go-SUSP ACC NEG-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' Japanese-ana-also inflects for tense and shares the adjectival inflectional pattern of the independent negative adjective na-(i) 'not exist'. In a standard left-branching analysis of Korean or Japanese clause structure, these parallels are difficult to capture. Postverbal negators in the SOVNeg pattern may be straightforwardly analyzed as heads (see

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Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan

Rice, 2011

The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with t... more The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with the hypothesis that agriculture spread north and east from the vicinity of Liaoning, beginning with the millets approximately 5500 BP. Wet rice agriculture in Korea and Japan results from a later spread, also beginning in Shandong, crossing via the Liaodong peninsula and reaching the Korean peninsula around 1500 BCE. This dispersal is associated with the Mumun archaeological culture after 1500 BCE in the Korean peninsula and the Yayoi culture after 950 BCE in the Japanese archipelago. From a linguistic standpoint, it is associated with the entry of the Japonic language family, first into the Korean peninsula, subsequently into the Japanese archipelago. The arrival of Koreanic is associated with the advent of the Korean-style bronze dagger culture and a temporary hiatus in wet rice agriculture sites around 300 BCE. Both Koreanic and Japonic are relatively shallow language families, with Ko...

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Postpositions vs Prepositions in Mandarin Chinese: The Articulation of Disharmony*

Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order, 2013

Drocourt, and Zhong Chen for discussion and data, and to three anonymous reviewers for incisive c... more Drocourt, and Zhong Chen for discussion and data, and to three anonymous reviewers for incisive comments which sharpened the theoretical focus of the paper. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the editors, Theresa Biberauer and Michelle Sheehan, for their patience and careful attention.

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Applicative structure and Mandarin ditransitives

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2010

We argue that applicative heads always appear above the lexical VP, regardless of the semantics o... more We argue that applicative heads always appear above the lexical VP, regardless of the semantics of the construction. Thematic Applicatives select a nominal expression and a VP as argument, parallel to Pylkkänen's (2008) "high" applicatives. The applied argument is merged in Spec, ApplP and receives a role such as beneficiary. Raising Applicatives appear in the same position above the lexical VP, but do not select an underlying nominal argument. Instead, they attract a goal DP from within the ditransitive VP to their specifier. This pattern captures the properties of a theme-goal ditransitive construction (Pylkkänen's "low" applicative). We show that the Mandarin double object construction 'Verb gěi IO DO' instantiates a raising applicative, where gěi realizes Appl 0 .

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Shi … de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese

The Linguistic Review, 2008

The shi. .. de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constr... more The shi. .. de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi. .. de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi. .. de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from it-or pseudo-clefts in languages like English. The crucial distinguishing property of shi. .. de clefts is that they involve no A movement. This is linked to the fact that the presupposition in the shi. .. de focus cleft involves a projection smaller than CP. It thus lacks a landing site for A movement and fails to host material such as negation, normally compatible with full CP clefts in languages such as English. The Mandarin pattern shows that the basic semantic property of clefts, bipartioning into focus and presupposition, is logically independent from A movement. 1. The origin of the present article dates back to John Whitman's stay at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale (CRLAO), Paris, as a research fellow invited by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) during winter 2000/2001. Since then it has gone through numerous revisions. It could have never been achieved without the painstaking efforts of our consultants, in particular Lu Peng, Yuan Jiahong, and Zhou Yuping. For comments and feedback, we would like to thank the audience of the conferences in Irvine, Rome, Leiden, and Budapest where this work was presented as well as Jim Huang, Audrey Li, Li Ming, and Lin Jo-wang. Last, but not least, we are indebted to two anonymous TLR reviewers, and especially to Huba Bartos for his perseverance and patience as editor of this special issue.

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The Vowels of Proto-Japanese

Japanese Language and Literature, 2004

'3' mi 1 /mi/ Ci /Ci/ '1,000' it /ti/ Ci 2 /Cwi/ 'body' mi 2 /mwi/ Ce 1 /Cye/ 'woman' me 1 /mye/ ... more '3' mi 1 /mi/ Ci /Ci/ '1,000' it /ti/ Ci 2 /Cwi/ 'body' mi 2 /mwi/ Ce 1 /Cye/ 'woman' me 1 /mye/ Ce /Ce/ 'hand' te /te/ Ce 2 /Ce/ 'eye' me 2 /me/ Co 1 /Cwo/ 'child' ko 1 /kwo/ Co /Co/ 'ear (of grain)' po /po/ Co 2 /Co/ 'this' ko 2 /ko/

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Alignment and word order in Old Japanese

Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2009

Hendriks 1998), with the result that adnominal inflection came to be used in main clauses without... more Hendriks 1998), with the result that adnominal inflection came to be used in main clauses without a kakari focus particle and eventually replaced the conclusive in main clauses. Miyagawa (1989) and Miyagawa and Ekida (2003), based on an extensive survey of EMJ literary texts, argue that the reanalysis of adnominal as a main clause predicate form led to the increased use of object marking with wo. 2.2 Kuroda (2007) Kuroda (2007) proposes that the diachronic difference between modern and earlier Japanese is accounted for by an Agreement Parameter (cf. Kuroda 1988): agreement is forced in earlier Japanese, but not in the modern language. In a forced agreement language, movement is triggered by agreement inducing features, and optionality does not come into play. Kuroda proposes that earlier Japanese was a forced agreement language; he claims that wh/focus movement is obligatory, and both subject and object take obligatory abstract case marking. In modern Japanese, in contrast, wh-phrases do not move, relative clause heads need not raise, and abstract case marking is optional. We will show that the alignment characteristics of OJ are compatible with the view that certain, but not all types of movement are forced in OJ nominalized clauses. In particular, complements marked by wo obligatorily move out of VP. However this obligatory movement, together with wh movement in OJ, is associated with the active alignment domain of OJ syntax: nominalized clauses. The characteristic word order flexibility and other types of optionality are allowed in conclusive clauses, the accusative alignment domain. 2.3 Previous Non-Accusative Analyses of Old Japanese 2.3.1 Vovin (1997) Vovin (1997) suggests that the suffix-i, analyzed as a subject case marker by traditional grammarians, represents in fact active case, marking subjects of transitive and of active intransitive verbs, but not subjects of non-active intransitive verbs. 3 Vovin further argues that the case marker wo marks absolutive case, in that wo appears not only with the object of transitive verbs, but with the subject of stative predicates, in particular predicates suffixed with-mi, called by Vovin "quality stative verbs." Based on the distribution of-i and wo, Vovin concludes that OJ is a language with active alignment. Although our analysis of OJ active alignment paper differs in many respects from his, Vovin deserves primacy of place as the originator of the hypothesis that OJ syntactic alignment is in important respects non-accusative.

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Millets, rice, and farming/language dispersals in East Asia

Language Dynamics and Change, 2017

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Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2002

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The evolving Japanese: the dual structure hypothesis at 30

Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2020

The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological ques... more The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological questions anywhere in the world, with a huge literature dating back to the nineteenth century and before. A growing consensus over the 1980s that the modern Japanese comprise an admixture of a Neolithic population with Bronze Age migrants from the Korean peninsula was crystallised in Kazurō Hanihara's influential 'dual structure hypothesis' published in 1991. Here, we use recent research in biological anthropology, historical linguistics and archaeology to evaluate this hypothesis after three decades. Although the major assumptions of Hanihara's model have been supported by recent work, we discuss areas where new findings have led to a re-evaluation of aspects of the hypothesis and emphasise the need for further research in key areas including ancient DNA and archaeology.

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The Syntax of CP and V-2 in Early Child German (ECG) The Strong Continuity Hypothesis

North East Linguistics Society, 1992

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A comparative approach to the vowel systems and harmonies in the Transeurasian languages and beyond

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages, 2020

In this chapter the standard treatments of the Transeurasian vowel correspondences are reviewed, ... more In this chapter the standard treatments of the Transeurasian vowel correspondences are reviewed, including their reconstructions of hypothetical proto-inventories, for the purpose of establishing a description of the Transeurasian vowel inventory and vowel harmony type. The review commences with a comparison of two major types of vowel-harmony systems in the Transeurasian languages, i.e. the palatal vs. the tongue-root harmony systems, and presents phonetic, phonological, and comparative evidence for a tongue-root harmony analysis of Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic. Interpretations of the main Transeurasian reconstructions are then proposed, such as Ramstedt (1952–66) and Poppe (1960b) according to tongue-root harmony analysis as opposed to the conventional palatal harmony analysis. After this, there is an effort to situate the Transeurasian vowel inventory in its typological and geographical neighborhood, including Northeast Asian languages and beyond, and in its linguistic geograph...

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Korean

Korean, 2019

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Neural correlates of semantic number: A cross-linguistic investigation

One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom a speaker ... more One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom a speaker is referring to. While previous work has documented the neural correlates of general number comprehension and quantity comparison, we investigate semantic number from a cross-linguistic perspective with the goal of identifying cortical regions involved in distinguishing plural from singular nouns. We use three fMRI datasets in which Chinese, French, and English native speakers listen to an audiobook of a children’s story in their native language. We select these three languages because they differ in their number semantics. While Chinese lacks nominal pluralization, French and English nouns are overtly marked for number. We find a number of known semantic processing regions in common, including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the pars orbitalis, in which cortical activation is greater for plural than singular nouns and posit a cross-linguistic role for number in semantic comprehension.

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John Whitman

1. Introduction The relegation of syntactic variation to lexical features under the Minimalist Pr... more 1. Introduction The relegation of syntactic variation to lexical features under the Minimalist Program has led to a growing awareness that syntactic change should be characterized in the same way: by changes in the discrete features of individual lexical items. This insight has given rise to the following distinctively minimalist typology of syntactic change: (1) a. Loss or gain of a feature driving movement (Roberts 1993, 1997). b. Grammaticalization as shift " up the tree " to a functional category (Roberts & Roussou 1999) c. Reanalysis as relabelling: lexical items change categorial or projection [+max, +min] features under preservation of hierarchical (c-command) relations (Whitman 2000). The objective of this paper is to apply this typology to several well-known examples of syntactic change in Chinese. We show that earlier analyses exaggerate the scope of syntactic change in the long-documented history of Chinese languages. The changes that are in fact attested can be...

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Shi ... de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese 1

The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct construc... more The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi...de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi...de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from itor pseudo-clefts in languages like English. The crucial distinguishing property of shi...de clefts is that they involve no A' movement. This is linked to the fact that the presupposition in the shi...de focus cleft involves a projection smaller than CP. It thus lacks a landing site for A' movement and fails to host material such as negation, normally compatible with full CP clefts in languages such as English. The Mandarin pattern shows that the basic semantic property of clefts, bipartioning into focus and presupposition, is logically independent from A' movement.

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Syntactic Change in Chinese and the Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry

The word order in Chinese has always been SVO, from the earliest attested documents (14-11 c. BC)... more The word order in Chinese has always been SVO, from the earliest attested documents (14-11 c. BC) up to Modern Mandarin. Examined carefully, the observed SOV cases in pre-Archaic Chinese turn out to either involve focalization of the object or object pronouns in the context of negation. Importantly, both structures observe head-complement order, i.e. a pattern consistent with VO. This removes any coherent basis for the claim that pre-Archaic Chinese was a SOV language. Against this background of stable VO order, important changes can, however, be observed for the distribution of adjunct phrases, from both preand postverbal position in pre-Archaic Chinese to exclusively preverbal position in Modern Mandarin, reflecting changes in the format of the vP.

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A Korean Grammatical Borrowing in Early Middle Japanese Kunten Texts and its Relation to the Syntactic Alignment of Earlier Korean and Japanese

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Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis

This paper argues that syntactic misparsing is not a significant factor in syntactic change, cont... more This paper argues that syntactic misparsing is not a significant factor in syntactic change, contrary to many earlier claims. It examines the best known examples in the literature of syntactic change resulting from alleged misparsing, and shows that the misparsing analysis is rejected in the most current research, or at best subject to alternative explanations. Cases discussed include SVO word order in Niger-Congo, the Chinese bǎ construction, and English for NP to VP infinitives. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of the roles of misparsing, broadly construed, in syntactic and phonological change.

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The source of the bigrade conjugation and stem shape in pre-Old Japanese

Proto-Japanese, 2008

Hifu o saku to kizu ga hukaku naru. skin ACC split when wound NOM deep becomes 'When one splits t... more Hifu o saku to kizu ga hukaku naru. skin ACC split when wound NOM deep becomes 'When one splits the skin, the wound gets deeper.' In (2), the vowel-stem verb is transitive, and the consonant-stem verb is transitive. This is the opposite of the situation in (1). This basic state of affairs-the existence of two main conjugation classes, the presence of formally similar stems in both conjugations, related by transitivity, and the unpredictability of the transitivity relation-has a very old history in Japanese. It obtains in the oldest attested variety, Old Japanese, as shown in (3) and (4): (3) a. ta=kwomura ni amu kak-i tuk-i hand=wrist on horsefly hang-RY attach-RY 'a horsefly bit (him) on the forearm and...' (Kojiki Yûryaku, 712) b. yo no naka ni kokoro tuk-e-zu-te world GEN midst in heart put-MZ-noting 'without paying heed to the affairs of the world' (MYS 4162, 746-757) (4) a. ipa sak-u rock split-SS/RT 'splits rock.' (Nihon shoki Jindai 2, 720, phonetic note explaining name of god) b. (tume) sake -te nail split-RY-ing 'the nail splits and...' (Nihon ryôiki 2.26, 822) THE BIGRADE CONJUGATION AND STEM SHAPE IN PRE-OLD JAPANESE 4 Pre-OJ *oki-u *oko-i *oko-i *oko-uru *oko-urai *oki-yo Lower Bigrade aku 'dawn' ake ake akuru akure akeyo Pre-OJ *ake-u *aka-i *aka-i *aka-uru *aka-urai *ake-y Monograde miru 'sees' mi mi miru mire miyo Pre-OJ *mi-ru *mi-i *mi-i *mi-ru *mi-rai *mi-yo

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Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2008

Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese 1.1 Pre-and post-verbal negation in OV languages. Dahl ... more Preverbal Elements in Korean and Japanese 1.1 Pre-and post-verbal negation in OV languages. Dahl (1979) (see also Dryer 1988, 1992) observes that SOV languages evince two typical negation patterns: one where the marker of negation immediately precedes the verb, and one where it follows. Inflected negative markers appear in the latter pattern; preverbal negators are uninflected particles. These two patterns are shown in (1-2) with examples from Korean and Japanese. (1) Preverbal Negation a. Mica ka hakkyo ey an ka-ss-ta. (Korean) Mica NOM school to NEG go-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' b. Tuki na mi-tamaΦ-i so! (Japanese; Taketori Monogatari 859) moon NEG see-HONORIFIC-CONTINUATIVE PRT 'Please don't look at the moon!' (2) Postverbal Negation a. Mica ka hakkyo ey ka-ci anh-ass-ta. (Korean) Mica NOM school to go-SUSP NEG-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' b. Yooko ga gakkoo ni ik-ana-katta koto (Japanese) Yôko NOM school to go-NEG-PAST that 'that Yôko didn't go to school.' Pas has the properties of a maximal projection: it does not block movement of the verb. Ne is analyzed by Pollock as a clitic, which moves with the verb to Tense. (3) [ TP Paul [ T' ne mange [ NegP pas t ne [ VP t V ]]]]. "Paul doesn't eat." Like ne, the post verbal negators anh-(2a) and-ana-(2b) are heads. Korean anh-is inflected for tense and selects a verbal complement in suspective-ci. It may optionally assign overt case to this complement (Song 1971): (4) Mica ka hakkyo ey ka-ci lul anh-ass-ta. Mica NOM school to go-SUSP ACC NEG-PAST-INDIC 'Mica didn't go to school.' Japanese-ana-also inflects for tense and shares the adjectival inflectional pattern of the independent negative adjective na-(i) 'not exist'. In a standard left-branching analysis of Korean or Japanese clause structure, these parallels are difficult to capture. Postverbal negators in the SOVNeg pattern may be straightforwardly analyzed as heads (see

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Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan

Rice, 2011

The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with t... more The languages of Northeast Asia show evidence of dispersal from south to north, consistent with the hypothesis that agriculture spread north and east from the vicinity of Liaoning, beginning with the millets approximately 5500 BP. Wet rice agriculture in Korea and Japan results from a later spread, also beginning in Shandong, crossing via the Liaodong peninsula and reaching the Korean peninsula around 1500 BCE. This dispersal is associated with the Mumun archaeological culture after 1500 BCE in the Korean peninsula and the Yayoi culture after 950 BCE in the Japanese archipelago. From a linguistic standpoint, it is associated with the entry of the Japonic language family, first into the Korean peninsula, subsequently into the Japanese archipelago. The arrival of Koreanic is associated with the advent of the Korean-style bronze dagger culture and a temporary hiatus in wet rice agriculture sites around 300 BCE. Both Koreanic and Japonic are relatively shallow language families, with Ko...

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Postpositions vs Prepositions in Mandarin Chinese: The Articulation of Disharmony*

Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order, 2013

Drocourt, and Zhong Chen for discussion and data, and to three anonymous reviewers for incisive c... more Drocourt, and Zhong Chen for discussion and data, and to three anonymous reviewers for incisive comments which sharpened the theoretical focus of the paper. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the editors, Theresa Biberauer and Michelle Sheehan, for their patience and careful attention.

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Applicative structure and Mandarin ditransitives

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2010

We argue that applicative heads always appear above the lexical VP, regardless of the semantics o... more We argue that applicative heads always appear above the lexical VP, regardless of the semantics of the construction. Thematic Applicatives select a nominal expression and a VP as argument, parallel to Pylkkänen's (2008) "high" applicatives. The applied argument is merged in Spec, ApplP and receives a role such as beneficiary. Raising Applicatives appear in the same position above the lexical VP, but do not select an underlying nominal argument. Instead, they attract a goal DP from within the ditransitive VP to their specifier. This pattern captures the properties of a theme-goal ditransitive construction (Pylkkänen's "low" applicative). We show that the Mandarin double object construction 'Verb gěi IO DO' instantiates a raising applicative, where gěi realizes Appl 0 .

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Shi … de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese

The Linguistic Review, 2008

The shi. .. de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constr... more The shi. .. de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi. .. de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi. .. de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from it-or pseudo-clefts in languages like English. The crucial distinguishing property of shi. .. de clefts is that they involve no A movement. This is linked to the fact that the presupposition in the shi. .. de focus cleft involves a projection smaller than CP. It thus lacks a landing site for A movement and fails to host material such as negation, normally compatible with full CP clefts in languages such as English. The Mandarin pattern shows that the basic semantic property of clefts, bipartioning into focus and presupposition, is logically independent from A movement. 1. The origin of the present article dates back to John Whitman's stay at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale (CRLAO), Paris, as a research fellow invited by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) during winter 2000/2001. Since then it has gone through numerous revisions. It could have never been achieved without the painstaking efforts of our consultants, in particular Lu Peng, Yuan Jiahong, and Zhou Yuping. For comments and feedback, we would like to thank the audience of the conferences in Irvine, Rome, Leiden, and Budapest where this work was presented as well as Jim Huang, Audrey Li, Li Ming, and Lin Jo-wang. Last, but not least, we are indebted to two anonymous TLR reviewers, and especially to Huba Bartos for his perseverance and patience as editor of this special issue.

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The Vowels of Proto-Japanese

Japanese Language and Literature, 2004

'3' mi 1 /mi/ Ci /Ci/ '1,000' it /ti/ Ci 2 /Cwi/ 'body' mi 2 /mwi/ Ce 1 /Cye/ 'woman' me 1 /mye/ ... more '3' mi 1 /mi/ Ci /Ci/ '1,000' it /ti/ Ci 2 /Cwi/ 'body' mi 2 /mwi/ Ce 1 /Cye/ 'woman' me 1 /mye/ Ce /Ce/ 'hand' te /te/ Ce 2 /Ce/ 'eye' me 2 /me/ Co 1 /Cwo/ 'child' ko 1 /kwo/ Co /Co/ 'ear (of grain)' po /po/ Co 2 /Co/ 'this' ko 2 /ko/

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Alignment and word order in Old Japanese

Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2009

Hendriks 1998), with the result that adnominal inflection came to be used in main clauses without... more Hendriks 1998), with the result that adnominal inflection came to be used in main clauses without a kakari focus particle and eventually replaced the conclusive in main clauses. Miyagawa (1989) and Miyagawa and Ekida (2003), based on an extensive survey of EMJ literary texts, argue that the reanalysis of adnominal as a main clause predicate form led to the increased use of object marking with wo. 2.2 Kuroda (2007) Kuroda (2007) proposes that the diachronic difference between modern and earlier Japanese is accounted for by an Agreement Parameter (cf. Kuroda 1988): agreement is forced in earlier Japanese, but not in the modern language. In a forced agreement language, movement is triggered by agreement inducing features, and optionality does not come into play. Kuroda proposes that earlier Japanese was a forced agreement language; he claims that wh/focus movement is obligatory, and both subject and object take obligatory abstract case marking. In modern Japanese, in contrast, wh-phrases do not move, relative clause heads need not raise, and abstract case marking is optional. We will show that the alignment characteristics of OJ are compatible with the view that certain, but not all types of movement are forced in OJ nominalized clauses. In particular, complements marked by wo obligatorily move out of VP. However this obligatory movement, together with wh movement in OJ, is associated with the active alignment domain of OJ syntax: nominalized clauses. The characteristic word order flexibility and other types of optionality are allowed in conclusive clauses, the accusative alignment domain. 2.3 Previous Non-Accusative Analyses of Old Japanese 2.3.1 Vovin (1997) Vovin (1997) suggests that the suffix-i, analyzed as a subject case marker by traditional grammarians, represents in fact active case, marking subjects of transitive and of active intransitive verbs, but not subjects of non-active intransitive verbs. 3 Vovin further argues that the case marker wo marks absolutive case, in that wo appears not only with the object of transitive verbs, but with the subject of stative predicates, in particular predicates suffixed with-mi, called by Vovin "quality stative verbs." Based on the distribution of-i and wo, Vovin concludes that OJ is a language with active alignment. Although our analysis of OJ active alignment paper differs in many respects from his, Vovin deserves primacy of place as the originator of the hypothesis that OJ syntactic alignment is in important respects non-accusative.

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Millets, rice, and farming/language dispersals in East Asia

Language Dynamics and Change, 2017

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Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2002

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The evolving Japanese: the dual structure hypothesis at 30

Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2020

The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological ques... more The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological questions anywhere in the world, with a huge literature dating back to the nineteenth century and before. A growing consensus over the 1980s that the modern Japanese comprise an admixture of a Neolithic population with Bronze Age migrants from the Korean peninsula was crystallised in Kazurō Hanihara's influential 'dual structure hypothesis' published in 1991. Here, we use recent research in biological anthropology, historical linguistics and archaeology to evaluate this hypothesis after three decades. Although the major assumptions of Hanihara's model have been supported by recent work, we discuss areas where new findings have led to a re-evaluation of aspects of the hypothesis and emphasise the need for further research in key areas including ancient DNA and archaeology.

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日琉祖語の音韻体系と連体形・已然 形の起源 ジョン ホイットマン

Appears in Takub, Yukinori, Tatsyua Hirako, and John Whitman (eds.) 2016. Ryūkyū shogo to Kodai N... more Appears in Takub, Yukinori, Tatsyua Hirako, and John Whitman (eds.) 2016. Ryūkyū shogo to Kodai Nihongo: Nichiryū sogo no saiken ni mukete (Ryūkyūan and Premodern Japanese: Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Japanese-Ryūkyūan). Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō.

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRST PROOF, A comparative approach of the vowel systems and harmonies in the Transeurasian languages and beyond

by John Whitman and Seongyeon Ko

First author is Andrew Joseph.

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Syntactic Glosses and Historical Syntax

by Michelle Troberg and John Whitman

L. Grestenberger, C. Reiss, H. A. Fellner, and G. Z. Pantillon (eds), Ha! Linguistic Studies in Honor of Mark R. Hale. Weisbaden: Reichert Verlag., 2022

This paper explores the significance of syntactic glosses as a data source for historical syntax,... more This paper explores the significance of syntactic glosses as a data source for historical syntax, and the specific utility of a glossed 12th century text for the study of Old Occitan (OOc). We show that in addition to their importance as sources of information about phonology and lexicon, glossed materials are a potential source of information about the syntax of languages in periods when extensive vernacular materials are scarce or lacking. We also make the point that analysis of syntactic glosses requires a theoretically informed understanding of the grammar under investigation, a point first
established in the generative study of older Indo-European languages by the scholar whom we honor (Hale 1987).

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