Evaluating the Lexical Hypothesis about Otagai
Hajime Hoji · Linguistic Research · 2010
This paper explores how the hypothetico-deductive method can be applied to research concerned with the properties of the language faculty by illustrat ing how it can be applied to the language-particula r hypothesis that otagai in Japanese is a local anaphor. The paper adopts Chomsky's (1993) conception of the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of the language faculty) and considers informant judgments to be a major source of evidenc e for or against hypotheses about the Computational System. Given that informants' acceptability judgments can be affected by various non-grammatical factors, it is imperative, for the purpose of putting our hypotheses to rigorous test, that we have a reasonably reliable means to identify inf ormant judgments as a likely reflection of properti es of the Computational System (or properties of the l anguage faculty that are directly related to the Computational System). The paper suggests a means to do so. I maintain that we are led to some version of it once we adopt the basic assumptions n oted above, along with the research heuristic, explicitly advocated by K. Popper, that we should m aximize our chances of learning from errors; cf. Popper 1963. The paper then examines, in accordance with the proposed method, the predictions made under the lexical hypothesis that otagai is a local anaphor and shows that the predictions are not borne out. If what underlies a local anaphor is closely related to active functional categories in the se nse of Fukui 1986 and if, as suggested in Fukui 1986, the mental lexicon of speakers of Japanese lacks them altogether, this result is as expected.