Expressive Small Clauses in Japanese⋆
Yu Izumi1 and Shintaro Hayashi1
Nanzan University, Department of Anthropology and Philosophy,
18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 466-8673, Japanyuizumi@nanzan-u.ac.jp
sh0211@nanzan-u.ac.jp

Abstract. This paper modifies and extends Potts and Roeper’s (2006) analysis
of simple uses of epithets such as You fool!, what they call Expressive Small
Clauses, to analogous phrases in Japanese. The original Potts and Roeper analysis is unable to account for two puzzling characteristics of Japanese Expressive
Small Clauses, which we cannot observe in those in English: first, the use of asecond person pronoun is not permitted in the Japanese counterparts, whereas
many other forms of pronouns and non-pronominal nouns are available; and second, something like “you fool” in Japanese can indeed occur as an argument of asentence. Drawing on the recent syntactic literature on the morphological variation of analogous uses of epithets, we propose an account that explains why there
are differences between English and Japanese Expressive Small Clauses.

1 Introduction
In recent years linguistic studies have been making contributions to understanding thesocially problematic aspect of language use, including slurring, dog whistling, propaganda, and hate speech (Potts 2007; Croom 2011; Langton 2012; Stanley 2015 among
others). Seemingly simple insults referred to as “Expressive Small Clauses” (ESC) by(Potts and Roeper 2006, henceforth P&R), illustrated in (1), are also a part of “fighting
words” that can provoke an audience and even incite violence (Greenawalt 1995).1(1)

a. Oh, You fool!
b. You idiot!

According to P&R, an ESC has no covert functional structure, and its expressive
meaning is solely due to the lexical property of the employed noun; for example, (2a)can be analyzed as (2b), where E is an expressive type that allows no further semantic
computation.
(2)

a. You fool!
b. fool (you) : E(P&R 2006, p.196, ex.40)

you : e fool : ⟨e, E⟩⋆

This research was in part supported by Nanzan University Pache Research Subsidy 1-A-2 forthe 2017 academic year.
1
To be accurate, P&R focus on ESCs used as self-disapprobation, not on those used to insult
others, but their analysis applies to other-directed ESCs as well.

Crucially, P&R use the normal Function Application in (2b), not a multidimensional
composition rule that would preserve a descriptive meaning of type e as part of theoverall multidimensional meaning. Since E is sealed from further semantic composition, this analysis explains why an ESC is never used in argument position and generally
unembeddable, as shown in (3–4).
(3)

a.

You fools should read more carefully.

b.

* You fool should read more carefully.
(P&R 2006, p.197, ex.44)(4)* I consider you fool/nincompoop/screwball.
(P&R 2006, p.187, ex.15a)

This paper modifies and extends P&R’s expressive analysis of ESCs to analogous
insults in Japanese. First, section 2 introduces Japanese ESCs and discusses how theydiffer from the English counterparts, showing that the original P&R analysis is unable
to account for two puzzling characteristics of Japanese ESCs. Second, drawing on the
recent syntactic literature on the morphological variation of ESCs, section 3 offers solutions to the puzzles identified in section 2.

2 Two Puzzles about Japanese ESCs
2.1 What Are ESCs in Japanese?
P&R present (5a–b) as instances of Japanese ESCs, but neither of them is obviously
analogous to (1) above.
(5)

a. Ore tte
baka dana.
me TOPIC idiot COPULA PART“I am such a fool”
b. Ore tte
o-baka-san.
me TOPIC HON-idiot-HON(P&R 2006, p.192, ex.31, the translation added by the authors)

First, since (5a) includes the copula da, it fails to meet P&R’s own criterion of ESCs, according to which they are “necessarily verbless” (p.184). Second, as opposed to ESCs,
which are highly productive as noted by P&R, (5b) isn’t compatible with a different
noun, as the contrast between (6) and (7) clearly indicates: (7) is simply incomprehensible even with enough contextual information analogous to (6). The contrast suggeststhat the phrase o-baka-san is a conventional idiom.
(6)

a. You are trying to make allies again. You politician!
b. You broke a glass again. You elephant!

(7)*/?? Ore tte
o-seijika/zou-san.
me TOPIC HON-politician/elephant-HON(Arsenijević 2007, p.89, ex.4)

Third, the straightforward interpretation of (5a–b) is more aligned with the full-sentential
counterparts of (1) (I’m a fool, etc.). (5a–b) just don’t seem to express emotive frustration about a present circumstance unlike (1); they are most naturally understood as aself-deprecating observation about one’s stable property such as character and habit.
Based on these considerations, we doubt that (5a–b) are ESCs in P&R’s sense.
In any case, whether P&R’s original examples turn out to be ESCs, there are obvious counterparts of (1) in Japanese, where two nouns are intervened by the genitivemarker no. (8) contains a first-person pronoun and corresponds to an ESC used as selfdisapprobation, while the examples in (9) contain a non-pronominal noun, and they areused as insults directed at others.
(8)

Ore/Watashi no baka/usotsuki!
1st.sing
GEN fool/liar(9)

a. Oneechan/Okaasan no baka/usotsuki! (kinship terms)
sister/motherGEN fool/liarb. Tanaka/Sacchan no baka/usotsuki! (proper names)c. Sensei/Shacho no baka/usotsuki! (“teacher”/“CEO”)
d. Taifuu/Teisupe Pasokon no baka/usotsuki! (“typhoon”/“low-spec PC”) (fromthe Internet)
e. Ko-no baka/usotsuki! (“this”)

The pattern here—“Noun 1-no-Noun 2”—is highly productive, and one can be creative
about the choice of the second noun; for example, Ko-no seijika! (“You politician!”)would be totally fine with enough contextual information. It is also worth noting thatthe presence of the genitive marker is similar to ESCs in most Scandinavian languages,
as extensively discussed by Julien (2016) (e.g., Din dust! “your fool” in Norwegian).
In the remainder of the current paper, we assume that phrases like (8) and (9) are thecounterparts of (1) in Japanese.
2.2 The First Puzzle
The first puzzle about Japanese ESCs is that the use of a second person pronoun in the“Noun 1” position is clearly degraded, as in (10), even though all other nouns that havea vocative use are acceptable in the same position, as we have seen in (9a–e) above.
(10) ?? Anata/Omae/Kisama/Temee
no baka/usotsuki!
2nd.sing (progressively more impolite forms) GEN fool/liar
In vocatives, the second person pronouns are just as acceptable as the other nouns here
(Anata/Oneechan, kocchi kite! “You/Sister, come here!”). Then, what is so special about
the second person pronouns in ESCs?
The P&R original analysis of ESCs on its own has no resource to address this puzzle. If a first person pronoun in Japanese were analyzed as an expression of type e toaccount for the acceptable case (8), then the analysis would have to predict (10) to be
acceptable as well, unless one rejects the very plausible view that the first and second
person pronouns are assigned the same basic semantic type.

One may suggest that some idiosyncratic syntactic property of the Japanese pronominal system deems examples like (10) illicit. Such a syntactic restriction is, however, notin the offing. Note, first, that (10) is not obviously ungrammatical—it merely sounds
odd, and second, that there is no independently motivated restriction on the person ofsubjects in Japanese that would exclusively rule out second person pronouns. Some
predicates of direct experience in Japanese are known to restrict the person of their subjects, but as (11) below indicates, they exclude everything but the first person subjects(Kuroda 1973; Kuno 1973; Tenny 2006, among others).
(11) Watashi/*Anata/*Tanaka wa kanashii yo.
1st.sing/2nd.sing/Tanaka TOP sadpart“I am/you are/Tanaka is sad.”Thus, in what follows, instead of seeking a general restriction on the second person
pronouns, we will derive the oddity of (10) in the semantic composition of Japanese
ESCs.
2.3 The Second Puzzle
The second puzzle about Japanese ESCs is that, unlike (3b) above, at least some of theJapanese ESCs mentioned above can be licitly used as an argument, as shown by (12).
Importantly, however, such argumental ESCs lack a contextual requirement for prototypical ESCs, i.e., the addressees of ESCs need to be the very individuals picked up by
the first nouns of the ESCs, as in (13a). Consider (13b), where an ESC is coupled with avocative use of the name Yamada. Assuming Yamada and Tanaka are not coreferential,(13b) hardly makes sense. This is because the addressee of (13b) is fixed by the vocative
Yamada, and that is incompatible with the conflicting addressee introduced by the ESC
subject Tanaka. By contrast, (12) shows that the referent of an argumental ESC doesn’t
have to be the addressee of the utterance.
(12) (Addressing at Yamada)Oi Yamada, Tanaka no baka ga mata shippai-shita yo.
Hey Yamada, Tanaka GEN fool NOM again mistake-did PART“Hey Yamada, that fool Tanaka made a mistake again.”(13)

a. Oi Tanaka, Tanaka no baka!
Hey Tanaka, Tanaka GEN foolb.

# Oi Yamada, Tanaka no baka!
Hey Yamada, Tanaka GEN fool

The P&R analysis of ESCs is incompatible with (12) because an argumental ESC
is precisely what their semantic system is designed to exclude (recall that according to
P&R, an ESC overall yields a meaning of type E, which cannot be an argument of asentence).
One may suggest that baka (“fool”) is ambiguous between the expressive and descriptive interpretations (⟨e, E⟩ vs ⟨e, t⟩), and Tanaka no baka in (12) isn’t an ESC afterall (probably, baka is a modifier of Tanaka). Although the underlying intuition here
points to the right direction (as we will see below), merely appealing to ambiguity leads
to more problems. Why can’t we say the same thing for fool in English? For P&R, foolis ambiguous to begin with. Then, what makes baka in (12) so different from fool in(3b) that an argumental ESC is permitted only in the former? There must be a principledexplanation for the differences between (12) and (3b).
To summarize, Japanese ESCs are different from the English counterparts in that,first, second person pronouns are not allowed in Japanese ESCs, and second, an argumental ESC is sometimes allowed in Japanese, but not in English. In what follows, wewill propose to solve these two puzzles at one fell swoop by making modifications to
the P&R analysis of ESCs.

3 (Dis)solving the Puzzles
3.1 Our Proposal
To account for the two puzzling phenomena presented in the previous section, we would
like to propose a modified analysis of ESCs that retains P&R’s basic insight—that ESCs
are expressives. Our analysis is designed to encompass the following two points.
(14) What P&R dubbed ESCs are not literally ‘small clauses’ consisting minimallyof the subject and the predicate, but they have more structure than meets theeye.
(15) The locus of the expressive property of an ESC is not an epithet noun such as
fool in itself; rather, its expressive meaning is derived with the help of anothersyntactic head located above the epithet noun.
(14) is, we think, not much contentious. Scholars such as Julien (2016) and Corver(2008) cross-linguistically examine ESCs (“possessive predicational vocatives” in Julien’s
terminology, and “evaluative vocatives” in Corver’s), and they both propose that there
is an independent syntactic head that is responsible for the predication relation between the subject and the predicate of an ESC. To give a concrete example, according
to Julien (2016), the Norwegian ESC din lille fjott (“you little dork”) is analyzed ashaving a head called “Pred,” which semantically connects “you” and “little dork” bymeans of predication; an ESC is not a mere concatenation of two nominals. (15) is concerned with what we have pointed out in section 2.3; simply regarding epithet nouns
as lexically ambiguous between descriptive and expressive interpretations would fail tocapture the above-mentioned differences between Japanese and English ESCs. We thus
have to attribute the source of the expressive meaning to something else. We identify itwith a higher syntactic head in the structure.
We also assume that Japanese is an NP language (Bošković 2012; Izumi 2011; Takahashi 2011, among many others), where NPs on their own can be an argument of asentence without being headed by some functional element such as a D. This assumption together with the view that an ESC includes a predicational structure implies that
English and Japanese ESCs are structurally different, as represented by (16).

(16)

a.

(English)D

E-Pred NP

you

fool

b.

(Japanese)pro1
E-PredNP
Tanaka no bakaHere, NPs are a complement of an E-Pred, and the English pronouns are inserted higher
than that (possibly as D). Since E-Pred requires an argument of type e, we also posit a
pro to serve as the subject of a Japanese ESC. The gist of the proposal is that an E-Pred
serves as a functional head responsible for the predication relation, which is more orless equivalent to Julien’s and Corver’s treatment of the predication inside ESCs.2
Let us now turns to the semantics of E-Pred. The basic idea is that it turns a descriptive nominal predicate into an expressive one. For present purposes, we can implement
the idea by taking it as an expression of type ⟨⟨e, t⟩, ⟨e, E⟩⟩, which takes an NP and
imposes an expressive interpretation on it. For concreteness, we represent an expressive
meaning in terms of sets of contexts (Predelli 2013; Gutzmann 2015). For example,
something like (17) can be said to reflect the observation that an ESC containing aderogatory noun is felicitously used only if the speaker intends to insult the addressee
by referring to the addressee with that noun.
(17) J E-Pred Kc = λP⟨e,t⟩ .λx.{c′ : c′S = cS and c′A = cA and x is c′A and c′S
considers c′A to be unfavorably describable as being P }(where cS is the speaker of context c and cA is the addressee of c)
In other words, a context in which an ESC is appropriately used is where the utterer ofthe ESC is expressing a derogatory attitude toward the hearer by calling her with thenoun in that ESC.
We also adopt Noguchi’s (1997) view that Japanese personal pronouns are NPs
as well as what philosophers call “Predicativism” about names, at least, with respect toJapanese proper names, according to which proper names are nominal predicates (Burge
1973, Elbourne 2005, Matushansky 2008, Izumi 2012, Fara 2015, among others). If we
prefer a simpler, unified semantics for all NPs in Japanese, then it would be reasonable
to suppose that personal pronouns and proper names in Japanese are both expressionsof type ⟨e, t⟩, and within the present framework, the following illustrates their lexical
meanings:(18) J anata Kc = λx.x is cA(19) J Tanaka Kc = λx.x is called “Tanaka”3
2

See also (Bowers 1993) for the idea that predication in general is established by a functionalhead.
3
A referential use of proper names can be derived using a type-shifting rule, which is needed
anyway to derive a referential use of a bare common noun in Japanese (Izumi 2012).

Now, the derivation for You fool! based on the proposed structure (16a) is the sameas the original P&R analysis (2b), except that fool is unambiguous and first turned into
an expressive predicate by E-Pred.
The derivation for the Japanese ESC (16b) proceeds in a parallel fashion:(20)

a. J Tanaka no baka Kc = λx.x is called “Tanaka” and a fool (via Predicate
Modification)b. J E-Pred Tanaka no baka Kc = λx.{c′ : x is c′A (= cA ) and c′S (= cS )considers c′A to be unfavorably describable as being called “Tanaka” and afool} (via Function Application)c. J pro1 E-Pred Tanaka no baka Kc = {c′ : the individual referred to by pro1is c′A (= cA ) and c′S (= cS ) considers c′A to be unfavorably describable as
being called “Tanaka” and a fool} (via Function Application and Traces
and Pronouns for pro1 )Thus, apart from the additional nominal predicate Tanaka, the English and Japanese
ESCs (16a–b) are analyzed as having the same expressive meaning: the speaker expresses an insulting attitude toward the addressee.
One may worry that, by presenting the second step as (20b), we are claiming thatthe addressee of (16b) is insulted by being called “Tanaka.” This outcome would beincongruous with an intuitive reading of (16b). That is not what (17) implies, however,
because it states that the addressee is insulted by being called with the whole NP, not justits part (a fake diamond is not a diamond). Also, note that the first noun in an ESC could
contribute a negative, derogatory meaning to the whole NP, as in the “low-spec PC”
example in (9d). Admittedly, the assumption we make for (20a) is simplistic ignoring
the NP internal structure and the possible contribution of the genitive marker to theoverall NP meaning. To be precise about the internal semantics of NPs, we would needto specify a theory of genitive constructions in Japanese. The simplistic assumption isadequate for present purposes, however.
3.2 A Solution to the First Puzzle
Applying the same derivation as (20) to the unacceptable (10), we obtain:(21) J pro1 E-Pred Anata no baka Kc = {c′ : the individual referred to by pro1 is
c′A (= cA ) and c′S (= cS ) considers c′A (= cA ) to be unfavorably describable as
being cA and a fool}
This should sound odd, if not incoherent, because c′A (= cA ) is described as cA (= c′A ),namely, the addressee of the context is described as the addressee of the context—aredundant way of describing someone. We claim that this type of redundancy explains
why a second person pronoun in Japanese ESCs is almost unacceptable but not obviously ungrammatical.
To put differently, an ESC always targets the addressee of the context (though theaddressee is sometimes the speaker herself), and so a Japanese second person pronoun,
which behaves like a predicate and thereby contributes the semantic information of“being the addressee” to the overall meaning, would be redundant in an ESC.

3.3 A Solution to (or a Dissolution of) the Second Puzzle
Since NPs on their own can occur as arguments in Japanese, the NP Tanaka no baka(“Tanaka GEN fool”) is licitly used as an argument; in other words, (12) in fact contains
no genuine ESC, and the lack of E-Pred explains the lack of an expressive meaning in(12). On the other hand, in the case of English, neither you fool nor fool is permitted
in argument position, because the former only has an expressive meaning of type E
and the latter is a mere NP, which must be headed by a D to be an argument in DP
languages.
By offering this solution we can be seen as dissolving the second puzzle about
ESCs, rather than solving it, because we deny that (12) has an ESC, understood as an
expressive phrase, concurring with P&R that no ESC can be an argument of a sentence.
Our account is an improvement over P&R’s insofar as it captures the differences between English and Japanese ESCs, while explaining why some genitive NPs in Japaneseare not really ESCs.

4 Concluding Remarks
We have presented two puzzling phenomena involving Japanese slurring ESCs and proposed possible solutions to the puzzles by modifying the P&R analysis of English ESCs.
The proposal is mainly based on the NP/DP language distinction, so future studies must
examine if there is a systematic difference between ESCs in NP and DP languages. Another research question is how to understand the internal structure of NPs in Japanese
ESCs—What is the relation between the first noun and the second noun? What is thenature of the genitive marker no? Whether it turns out to be empirically tenable, ourproposal opens up many research questions concerning the structure and meaning of
nominal expressions.

References
Arsenijević, B.: Disapprobation expressions are vocative epithets. ACLC Working Papers 2(2)(2007) 87–98
Bošković, v.: Phases in NPs/DPs. In ’Angel J. Gallego, ed.: Phases: Developing the Framework.
Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2012) 343–383
Bowers, J.: The syntax of predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4) (1993) 591–656
Burge, T.: Reference and proper names. The Journal of Philosophy 70(14) (1973) 425–439
Corver, N.: Uniformity and diversity in the syntax of evaluative vocatives. Journal of Comparative
Germanic Linguistics 11 (2008) 43–93
Croom, A.M.: Slurs. Language Sciences 33 (2011) 343–358
Elbourne, P.D.: Situations and Individuals. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2005)
Fara, D.G.: Names as predicates. Philosophical Review 124 (2015) 59–117
Greenawalt, K.: Fighting Words: Individuals, Communities, and Liberties of Speech. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1995)
Gutzmann, D.: Use-Conditional Meaning: Studies in Multidimensional Semantics. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2015)
Izumi, Y.: Interpreting bare nouns: Type-shifting vs. Silent heads. In: The Proceedings of the
21st Semantics and Linguistics Theory. (2011) 481–494

Izumi, Y.: The Semantics of Proper Names and Other Bare Nominals. PhD thesis, University of
Maryland, College Park, Maryland (2012)
Julien, M.: Possessive predicational vocatives in Scandinavian. Journal of Comparative Germanic
Linguistics 19 (2016) 75–108
Kuno, S.: The structure of the Japanese Language. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts(1973)
Kuroda, S.Y.: Where epistemology, style and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese. In
Kiparsky, P., Anderson, S.R., eds.: A Festschrift for Morris Halle. Holt, Rinehart & Winston(1973) 377–391
Langton, R.: Beyond belief: Pragmatics in hate speech and pornography. In Maitra, I., McGowan,
M.K., eds.: Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech. Oxford University Press,
Oxford (2012) 72–93
Matushansky, O.: On the linguistic complexity of proper names. Linguistics and Philosophy
31(5) (2008) 573–627
Noguchi, T.: Two types of pronouns and variable binding. Language 73. 4 (1997) 770 – 797
Potts, C.: The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2007) 165–198
Potts, C., Roeper, T.: The narrowing acquisition path: From declarative to expressive small
clauses. In Progovac, L., Paesani, K., Casielles-Suárez, E., Barton, E., eds.: The Syntax ofNonsententials: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2006) 183–
201
Predelli, S.: Meaning Without Truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2013)
Stanley, J.: How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press, New Jersey (2015)
Takahashi, M.: Some Theoretical Consequences of Case-marking in Japanese. PhD thesis, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut (2011)
Tenny, C.L.: Evidentiality, experiencers, and the syntax of sentience in Japanese. Journal of East
Asian Linguistics 15 (2006) 245–288