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In the novel I'm reading now (「キッチン」 by 吉本{よしもと}ばなな), there's this section
where the protagonist is talking about her boyfriend's brother for the first
time, introducing him to readers and giving his description. There's also a
sentence which gives the brother's name:

> 名を、柊という。

I have a problem understanding grammar in this sentence:

  * What is the purpose of 「を」 in this sentence? I guess the predicate is implied but I cannot figure out what it could be.

  * The sentence ends with 「という」. Should I interpret it as 「と言う」?

Let me know if more context information is required.
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2014-09-17T02:57:03.473
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2014-09-21T23:34:23.363
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question
grammar
Trouble understanding grammar in 「名を、柊という。」
# The simple answer

This いう, which you could gloss as "call", simply takes two arguments. You can
call it a "accusative-quotative construction" (which is just a fancy way of
saying that there is both an を-marked thing and a と-marked thing).

# The actual answer

To learn more about these so-called accusative-quotative constructions, let us
play with this sentence:

> チョコは非回答者が可愛いと思っている。  
>  tyoko-ha [[hikaitousya-ga kawai-i] to] omot-tei-ru  
>  "Choko thinks that 非回答者 is cute."

Another way to say this is by lifting 非回答者 outside of the downstairs predicate
and marking it with を:

> チョコは非回答者を可愛いと思っている。  
>  tyoko-ha hikaitousya-wo [kawai-i to] omot-tei-ru  
>  "Choko considers 非回答者 to be cute."

Note: I will be alternating "thinks" and "considers" in English because
"considers" sometimes allows me to build a sentence with similar syntax to the
Japanese in English while "thinks" doesn't always work as smoothly.

Another way to say it is by using a complex predicate 可愛く思う:

> tyoko-ha hikaitousya-wo [kawai-ku omot]-tei-ru  
>  "Choko considers 非回答者 cute."

In the previous sentence, 非回答者 is _not_ "lifted" out of a downstairs
predicate, because 「ちょこは非回答者が可愛く思っている」 is not grammatical. 非回答者 is simply at
the top level.

* * *

The same sort of thing also works for other predicates, such as

> チョコは非回答者が不満だと思っている。  
>  tyoko-ha [[hikaitousya-ga human da] to] omot-tei-ru  
>  "Choko thinks that 非回答者 is dissatisfied."
>
> チョコは非回答者を不満だと思っている。  
>  tyoko-ha hikaitousya-wo [[human da] to] omot-tei-ru  
>  "Choko considers 非回答者 to be dissatisfied."

You can also kind of get rid of the inner predicate like we did with 可愛いと→可愛く,
but it doesn't work out perfectly:

> チョコは非回答者を不満に思っている。  
>  tyoko-ha hikaitousya-wo human-ni omot-tei-ru  
>  "Choko considers 非回答者 dissatisfactory."

Namely, the "experiencer" of 不満 is now Choko, not 非回答者.

However, this does not hold for all semantically similar sentences. For
example, 次郎はその仕事が楽だと感じた→次郎はその仕事を楽に感じた works just fine (i.e., they have the
same meaning).

This is totally my own interpretation, but I think when this transformation
takes place, the "experiencer" of the verb switches to the nominative.
Sometimes, this can result in a different interpretation, but sometimes, it
results in the same interpretation.

In fact, I think the same happens with 可愛く, it's just "experiencing" 可愛い means
thinking that someone is cute -- there is no other way to experience it. (For
the few others I've thought of, this type of argument seems to hold for all
i-adjectives, but obviously not for all na-adjectives as evidenced by 不満).

* * *

Anyways, after taking you on that long linguistic journey, I'm basically going
to say that a lot of that isn't really relevant. I just wanted to introduce
that there are some verbs which seem to accept を and と simultaneously, and
those are the verbs that allow what has historically been described as
"raising-to-object" or "exceptional case marking" (which means there are many
sentences which you can use to get a feel for how the を-marked thing and
と-marked thing interact).

Finally, to answer the actual question, this いう is one such verb that accepts
both an を-marked thing and と-marked thing simultaneously:

> 名を柊という。 "(He) says (his) name as Hiiragi."→"(He) calls himself
> Hiiragi."→"His name is Hiiragi."
>
> 彼を柊という。 "(I/we) call him Hiiragi."→"His name is Hiiragi."

In this case, と is not really compartmentalizing a predicate, but instead
acting quotatively. Either way, it's the same thing as we saw before.

* * *

**References** :

Unfortunately, I could not find a reference which exactly discusses things
using the perspective I gave, but these are in a very, very close ballpark.
They discuss the syntax and semantics of these accusative-quotative
constructions in great detail without getting too technical and were very fun
for me to read.

  * Horn, S. W. (2008). [Semantic constraints on the subject-to-object raising (ECM) construction in Japanese](http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/files/horn.eals.pdf).

  * Matsuoka, M. (2012). [On so-called small clause constructions in English and Japanese](http://opac.lib.yamanashi.ac.jp/metadb/up/honkan/14_265-271.pdf).
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