Thetic judgment as presentational

Abstract

Abstract Kuroda (1965, 1972, 1992) pointed out the distinction between topicalized and nontopicalized sentences in terms of judgment styles, discussing what semantico/cognitive functions they express. His work has set the foundations for generative studies of Japanese; however, the differences in judgment styles have not been well-represented in syntactic structure. In particular, thetic judgment sentences seem to have been mis-treated, which have often been mixed up with neutral description sentences in the sense of Kuno (1973). In this paper, I argue that thetic judgment sentences constitute an independent syntactic representation that shares the characteristics of presentationals such as Locative Inversion in English. The apparent differences between thetic judgments in Japanese and presentationals in English are attributed to the differences in these languages with respect to how sentence types are syntactically represented; either at the right periphery (i.e., at Head of the C system) or at the left periphery (i.e., at Spec of the C system).