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Highlights: [⿢] A syntax and semantics of nominalized clauses headed by koto in Japanese are given. [⿢] Koto-nominalized clause can denote either a concrete event or an abstract proposition. [⿢] Koto serves as a maximality operator for clauses as well as NPs. [⿢] The koto-nominal is ambiguous depending on the structure with which koto merges. [⿢] Linguistic distinction between physical causation and causal judgment is identified. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends this line of research by focusing on a case in which learners cannot rely on morphosyntactic cues in order to reach the appropriate aspectual interpretation. We examine the acquisition of telicity by English-speaking learners of Japanese, focusing on how learners interpret bare count nouns such as kaado 'card' that obligatorily display count noun morphosyntax in English. In Japanese, a bare noun such as kaado is ambiguous with respect to number and therefore a verb phrase such as kaado-o kakimashita 'wrote card' can be interpreted as either telic 'wrote the cards' or atelic 'wrote cards' depending on the context. The results of two studies with both intermediate (Study 1: n = 38; Study 2: n = 38) and advanced (Study 1: n = 7; Study 2: n = 10) learners of Japanese show that there are learners at both levels of proficiency that have difficulty with the interpretation of bare count nouns and assign an exclusively telic reading to a verb phrase such as kaado-o kakimashita 'wrote card'. We argue that this interpretation is due to the boundedness of count nouns in L1 English and propose that a retreat from negative transfer is difficult when there is variability in the native speaker input and when meaning has to be derived from context in the absence of morphosyntactic cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We discuss the result in light of two types of parsing models: models that only consider attaching a modifier to candidate sites whose lexical heads have already been encountered, and models in which predicted categories are also considered as possible modification sites. We contend that the preference to attach to the least local site over the intermediate site argues against the first type of model, and supports the second type of model with a factor such as predicate proximity or anaphor resolution driving the preference to attach the RC to the least local candidate site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]