Deriving and processing experiencer subject causatives

Abstract

This paper examines experiencer subject causatives in Japanese, where the animate subject functions as an experiencer rather than an agent (e.g., Taro-ga kyoohuu- de boosi-o tob-asi-ta ’Taro’s cap got blown off on him due to the strong wind’). The paper is divided into two parts: formal and experimental. In the first part, adopting the functional head Affect (Bosse et al. 2012), I propose that the experiencer subject merges with the Spec of AffectP, which is positioned between the causing-event-introducing CauseP and the semantically contentless expletive VoiceP (i.e., CauseP < AffectP < expletive VoiceP). To account for the possessor–possessum relationship between the subject and object, I argue for a pragmatic analysis over potential syntactic alternatives. Additionally, I adopt the view that each lexical entry contains syntactic structures to explain lexical idiosyncrasies. My proposal comprehensively captures the key aspects of experiencer subject causatives. I further claim that the inanimate causer adjunct (e.g., kaze-de ’due to the wind’) adjoins to CauseP, positioned above VP, which introduces the theme (e.g., boosi-o ’his cap’). The second section reports on a sentence-processing experiment designed to distinguish between the proposed high-causer analysis and the alternative low-causer analysis, where the causer is located below the theme. The results reveal that the theme–causer order takes longer to process than the causer–theme order, lending support to the high-causer analysis. These findings provide insight into the long-standing issue regarding the syntactic position of inanimate causers.