earticle

영어

This paper argues, contrary to what is widely accepted in the literature, that shika ‘only’ in Japanese has two different features based on the syntactic positions. In other words, shika in the argument positions syntactically behaves different from shika in the non-argument positions. This can be seen from the fact that the former is able to co-occur with other Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as Indeterminate-mo (dare-mo/nani-mo/dokoni-mo ‘anyone/anything/anywhere’) or kessite ‘never’ in the same clause, whereas the latter is not able to do. It is well known that shika is one of Toritate focalizers such as mo ‘also’, sae ‘even’ or dake ‘only’ etc and it can be followed by noun phrases such as nominative or accusative, inherent case markers such as kara ‘from’, de ‘in’ or to ‘with’ etc, adverbs, sentential verbs, te form, quotational clause and koto clause. In past studies, it has been widely observed that shika is categorized into a single type regardless of whether or not it is followed by. Assuming that their analyses were correct, they cannot explain that why shika which is followed by a nominative/accusative noun cannot occur with other NPIs in the same clause, whereas shika which is followed by inherent case markers, adverbs, sentential verbs, te form, quotational clause and koto clause can. This shows us that (i) shika in the argument positions is different from one in the non-argument positions and that (ii) shika should be categorized into at least two types in terms of the syntactic positions.