abstract

Among various syntactic categories or constituents, the distinction and classification of adjuncts have yet been a controversial issue in linguistic researches for decades. The foremost cause of inconclusiveness for the topic is of its difficulty to ascertain whether their distribution is determined basically by a certain semantic principles, or regulated by features within syntactic clause structure. Addition to such incompatibility of standpoints, little is known about how adjuncts or adverbials are processed within our brains. Therefore, this presentation aims to concern with the processing of adjuncts in Japanese, particularly focusing on the position of aspectual modifiers.

In the literature, Minami (1974) elaborately discussed the semantic classification of Japanese adjuncts. Based on his classification of adjuncts into three types, Koizumi (1991, 1993) argued that the adjuncts in Japanese could be classified by their appearance at three syntactically distinct positions: MP (Modal Phrase) adjuncts, IP (Inflectional Phrase) adjuncts, and VP (Verb Phrase) adjuncts. According to this proposal on phrasal classification, Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004) most recently demonstrated with online sentence processing experiment that Japanese adverbials occupy certain sequential positions that they belong to. To search the basic positions of adjuncts or adverbials between verbs and its arguments, a method adopted in their experiment was a sentence plausibility judgement task: presenting a whole sentence on a screen at once and measuring the participants' reaction times.

Our experiment, following Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004) who discussed that the basic order of Japanese adjuncts is modal adjunct ? tense adjunct ? manner/resultative adjunct, we mainly take up the adjuncts which involve with Japanese aspect features, particularly represented by perfective features or progressive features. From numbers of theoretical backgrounds, we expect that aspect features exist between tense and verb, whose property should apparently be differentiated and be treated individually. Assuming that basic word order of Japanese is SOV, and moreover, being apart from VP adjunct and IP adjunct, the adjunct which carry the aspectual features, we assume, must always appear at a position between nominative NP and accusative NP as far as canonical word order is concerned.

We arranged for test sentences a group of Japanese canonical sentences including various aspectual adjuncts. The sentences were shown online to native speakers of Japanese to examine a fundamental position for the adjuncts, in a means of sentence plausibility judgement task. The result in our experiment should imply that Japanese aspectual adjuncts are restricted by phrase structure just as other types of adjuncts are so, and furthermore it gives a supplementary support toward Koizumi (1991, 1993), and Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004). Although there are numerous unsolved problems for the position or property of adverbials and adjuncts, we have shown that psycholinguistic research can also account for this issue.