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This book revives and reinterprets a persistent intuition running through much of the classical work: that the unitary appearance of Obligatory Control into complements conceals an underlying duality of structure and mechanism. Idan Landau argues that control complements divide into two types: In attitude contexts, control is established by logophoric anchoring, while non-attitude contexts it boils down to predication. The distinction is also syntactically represented: Logophoric complements are constructed as a second tier above predicative complements.The theory derives the obligatoryde sereading of PRO as a special kind ofde reattitude without ascribing any inherent feature to PRO. At the same time, it provides a principled explanation, based on feature transmission, for the agreement properties of PRO, which are stipulated on competing semantic accounts. Finally, it derives a striking universal asymmetry: the fact that agreement on the embedded verb blocks control in attitude contexts but not in non-attitude contexts. This book is unique in being firmly grounded in both the formal semantic and the syntactic studies of control, offering an integrated view that will appeal to scholars in both areas. By bringing to bear current sophisticated grammatical analyses, it offers new insights into the classical problems of control theory.

This book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light, and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne, na, yo, sa, wa, zo and ze. By adopting three key notions, 'involvement', 'formality' and 'gender', the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker, but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general, including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.

We examined the effects of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in comprehending different types of irony by Chinese-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We tested 15 children with ASDs, along with another 15 typically developing (TD) children. In our test, by manipulating the use of the prototypical SFP /a/, participants were required to judge the speaker's attitude and real intention in ironic utterances of 16 stories and to further explain the language phenomenon. The results of a three-way analysis of variance showed a significant difference between the two groups: first, children with ASDs performed significantly worse than did their TD counterparts; second, while TD children relied more on SFPs to understand irony of compliment, children with ASDs only performed better with SFPs in comprehending irony of criticism. The differences are discussed in relation to theory of mind, the frequency of utterance, and rules of cognition.

This paper re-examines the syntactic properties of the sentence-final particle (henceforth, SFP) in Hong Kong Cantonese (henceforth, Cantonese). Despite studies such as Lam 2014, Tang 2020, and Law et al. 2024, variation persists among native speakers in their judgments regarding the acceptability of SFP clusters such as . Additionally, Law et al.’s (2024) preliminary observation that involves an addressee shift remains underexplored. To address these issues, this paper investigates whether can co-occur with the class of Degree SFPs (Tang 2015a). The results reveal that there are two distinct s: one operating at the propositional level and the other at the speech act level. To capture this contrast, I propose that [A] is an SFP occupying the head of F3P, which is one of the layers of the split-FP under the cartographic approach (Tang 2015b). On the other hand, [B] is a pro-sentence merged with the antecedent sentence by an empty conjunction, forming a general conjunctive structure. The proposed account provides better empirical coverage compared to previous literature (Lam 2014; Law et al. 2024) and enhances our understanding of the nature of the left periphery in natural languages.

To investigate the interaction between tone and intonation on the production of the sentence-final syllables and the effects of a specific type of characters, i.e. sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Nanjing dialect, acoustic analyses were carried out in the current study. Participants were asked to produce sentences under four conditions: (1) SFPs in interrogative sentences; (2) SFPs in declarative sentences; (3) homophones of the SFPs in interrogative sentences; (4) homophones of the SFPs in declarative sentences. The acoustic productions were analyzed in order to compare the same SFPs in different intonation patterns, i.e., interrogatives and declaratives, and SFPs and their homophones in the carrier sentences. Results showed that the influence of intonation on tones within sentence-final syllables indeed exists, but SFPs mitigate the extent to which intonation functions. These results suggest that intonation is present in tonal languages as well, whereas SFPs influence the realization of intonation by reducing the extent of global rising.

Mandarin Chinese clausal syntax can be described as strictly head-initial, with the exception of certain \"particles\" which are linearized at the end of the clause. Previous work on these sentence-final particles (SFPs) has assumed that all SFPs are very high, in the CP periphery. In this paper I show that a subset of SFPs are in a lower, clause-medial position, based on the scopal interaction of these SFPs with negation, modals, quantificational subjects, and alternative question disjunction. I identify this position as coinciding with the edge of the lower phase, traditionally identified as vP. As SFPs are head-final heads with head-initial complements, they have been discussed as an important apparent exception to the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC), a proposed universal on structure-building and linearization. The existence of exceptions to FOFC in a clause-medial position in addition to the CP edge motivates the view that FOFC holds only within individual Spell-Out domains.

This paper investigates the interpretive restrictions on the subjects of imperative, promissive, and exhortative sentences—what we call the \"jussive\" clause types. It argues that the data cannot be explained by a theory that appeals only to semantic and pragmatic factors, and that an account crucially involving syntax is required. We propose that jussive clauses contain a functional head that bears a person feature. This head is an operator that, when in a sufficiently local configuration, binds the subject and enters an agreement relation with it. The restrictions in person features exhibited by the subjects are a consequence of this agreement relation. Moreover, we show that the syntactic structures produced by our analysis are compatible with a compositional semantics that yields the correct interpretation for imperatives and other jussives.

It is argued in this paper that a sentence should consist of at least three layers, namely proposition, grounding, and response, which are formed by a number of functional categories, such as Event, Temp, Focus, Degree, and CoA. A cartographic analysis of the performative projections can be supported by the data of the sentence-final particles in Cantonese, focusing on the sentence-final particle ho and other members of the h -family, which may allow us to have a better understanding of the syntax of the speech act domain and should have implications for the cross-linguistic study of the performatives and the theory of the Universal Grammar.

On the basis of considerations involving complementizers, sentence-final particles, need, aspect, tense, focus and topic, agreement morphemes, determiners, verbrelated particles and adpositions, I reach the conclusion that many more heads in the sentential projection line (and elsewhere) must be taken to be silent than is usually thought. I then argue that this state of affairs ultimately reflects the fact that every projecting head is silent. 提要 本文探討的對象包括標句詞、句末助詞、“need”、體、時、焦點與話題、一致關係 語素、限定詞、與動詞有關的助詞、介詞，得出的結論是：在句子投射系列及其他 位置上，無聲中心語的數目應該遠多於過去所理解。本文進而指出，以上的情況都 說明一個事實，那就是中心語都是無聲的成分。

Japanese society’s traditional gender norms are reflected by sentence-final particles (SFPs) in daily conversation. However, recently, Japanese young people have started to use gendered SFPs in “unclassical” ways. This study mainly examines the usage of the so-called “female” SFPs wa and no by male speakers. In total, 68 cases of wa (43 by male speakers and 25 by female speakers) and 84 cases of no (47 by male speakers and 37 by female speakers) usage were collected from casual conversations of Japanese college students in TalkBank, a public linguistic database. This study demonstrates that the “female” SFPs wa and no are used more frequently by male speakers than by female speakers. Different from the female speakers’ usage to soften the utterances and enhance conversational rapport, wa and no used by male speakers perform other functions. In particular, wa directly indexes self-centeredness, serving the speaker to express emotion, share personal ideas, or perform speech acts such as teasing or amae in a self-focused way, while no directly indexes truthfulness, which allows the speaker to share a story in a vivid tone, reconfirm the speaker’s prior statement, or provide the speaker’s explanation/reasoning in an assertive tone. This study suggests that the new, unconventional gender-based usages of SFPs reveal the social changes in gender dynamics in modern Japanese society, which should not be overlooked in language education.