The Exhortative-Participle Construction in Hello! Project English (Part 1)

Part 1

It appears I’m being devoured by a number of final projects/assignments (four!), all of them related to linguistics, so I decided to take some time aside to post some H!P-related linguisticizing of my own.⁰

This is a brief examination of the exhortative-participle construction in Japanese English (English as spoken in Japan; cf. American English or Australian English), or perhaps it is peculiar only to Hello! Project English: that is, the construction which places an exhortative particle (let’s) next to a verb in its present-participle form (as in let’s dancing) as opposed to a verb in its infinitive form (let’s dance), which is typical of most varieties of English. If we suppose that this is a genuine product of a variety of English that differs from most others in this regard, then this particular construction is deserving of continued study as part of an effort to illuminate the rules that constrain natural human languages and the processes by which languages evolve.¹

This interesting construction appears in this video of Disney-brainwashed² Morning Musume, which was kindly brought to my attention by Celestia at Bikkuri Project: