The internally headed relative clause construction in Japanese: A cognitive grammar approach

This dissertation presents a cognitive grammar analysis of the internally-headed relative clause (IHRC) construction in Japanese, which differs from the externally-headed relative clause (EHRC) construction in that the semantic head is inside the subordinate clause. While previous analyses of the construction in the generative literature can be characterized as "reductive" in that they attempt to reduce the structure of an IHRC to that of an EHRC in one way or another (e.g. positing an empty external head), this dissertation claims that the IHRC construction has its own conceptual import that cannot be captured by the "reductive" approaches: the IHRC construction is essentially metonymic in that it is a reference-point construction that involves active-zone/profile discrepancy, where the conceptualizer invokes the profiled subordinate-clause event as a reference point for purposes of establishing mental contact with an active-zone/target (=internal head) within the dominion of the reference point.; Chapter 1 outlines a typological survey of the IHRC construction and sketches its cross-linguistic properties. Chapter 2 summarizes important previous studies of the IHRC construction in Japanese. Chapter 3 presents the theoretical framework of cognitive grammar developed by Langacker, which I adopt in this dissertation. Chapter 4 is the main chapter of the dissertation, where a wide range of data is uncovered to argue for the proposed cognitive grammar account of the construction. It is argued that head interpretation follows the natural paths, that the construction can be "headless" if some conditions are met that give the target concept sufficient cognitive salience, that the prototypical relationships that the IHRC bears to the main clause are Cause and Precondition, and that an IHRC expresses the thetic judgment. Chapter 5 sketches how the proposed analysis of the IHRC construction sheds a new light on some related constructions, including the tokoro-complement construction, the relational noun-modifying construction, and the no-relative construction. Chapter 6 is a conclusion, in which theoretical implications of the present work for typology and cognitive linguistics will be discussed, along with some tasks left for future research.