Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech

Hi!

Philip Newton writes:
>...
> However, my rusty Japanese interprets "kinou sakana-o katta-no-wa ii"
> as "my buying the fish yesterday was good/a good thing" -- that is,
> having "no" refer to the action rather than to the object. Though that
> might be interference from sentences with verb+"koto", now that I
> think about it -- "kinou sakana-o katta-koto-wa ii".
The IHRCs in Japanese and Korean are underspecified as to which
argument the 'no' refers.  Here, there's only 'sakana' so I suppose
there's no ambiguity.  If you have both subject and object the
situation might be confusing.  (OTOH, the situation is not worse than
normal Japanese dropping every 'superfluous' pronoun anyway.)

I think the 'no'-construction cannot refer to the verb.  My knowledge
about this, however, is from linguistical papers, not from classes or
experience of Japanese so I have no intuition whatsoever.

**Henrik