A Student's Introducation to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum

My posts on this blog are largely on the Japanese language (thus far), so that some of you may think that I am uninterested in English (or else I am not trained as a specialist of English). In fact, I have been studying, thinking about, and writing about English, and I hope to develop a career-long interest in various aspects of that language. If you are a college student majoring in English, let me recommend that you read Professors Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum's (2005) A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (Cambridge University Press) for a start. To my knowledge, it is one of the best student textbooks for English grammar. I learned a lot. (For Japanese students: この本には『ケンブリッジ現代英語文法入門』という邦訳があります。横浜国立大学の高橋邦年先生が監訳されたものですが、申し分のない完成度です。英語で読むのが大変であればこの邦訳もお薦めです。）

Japanese productive causative sentences are not biclausal (but in fact bipropositional and this is not a mere notational variant).

Following Yuhara (2009, 2010), this short paper again touches on a problem in generative studies of the Japanese language that has persisted to the degree that it no longer can be considered an oversight or misunderstanding. While the past fifty years of intensive research under transformational generative grammar has revealed many important characteristics of Japanese, I am of opinion that the language has also been misanalyzed by a group of linguists strongly associated with Cambridge, MA who have casually adopted Eurocentric conceptions of grammar and pushed them to the limit and beyond. This squib deals with one consequence of such syntactic analyses, a widely-accepted claim that Japanese productive causative sentences are biclausal. It is my contention that they are in fact bipropositional and that this difference is by no means a mere notational variant in much of generative linguistic theorizing.

(downloadable from here)