Semantics of why and naze, and Wh-Merger

Why is different from other wh-phrases in that it does not occur in a multiple whquestion. Syntactic explanations have been given for it, but this paper tries to give a semantic explanation to it. A semantically anomalous sentence need not be rejected by syntax. If multiple wh-questions with why are semantically anomalous, they cannot be evidence for any syntactic rule. Section 1 gives the basic assumptions, Section 2 clarifies the semantics of why which underlies its syntactic behavior. Section 3 compares why with naze in Japanese, and discusses Wh-Merger, which applies in Japanese but not in English

Negative Polarity Items and Compound Negatives

Lift a finger, a red cent, etc. in English mean yubi ippon ugokasu, bita itimon, etc. in Japanese, while mettani, kessite, etc. do not correspond to any English words. Mettani-nai, kessite-nai, etc. are equivalent to English rarely, never, etc. This paper tries to clarify the behavior of these two types of negatives

Semantic Analysis of Potential rare in Japanese

Potential rare, and tough predicates yasui \u27easy\u27, nikui \u27hard\u27 pose some important questions for most grammatical theories. They are attached to another predicate and change the number of its complements. They may turn an adverb into a ga-marked complement. They may delete the original subject and promote a complement into the subject position. This paper gives syntactic analysis of some typical expressions that contain potential rare, and formulates semantic representations of them. The syntactic analysis follows that of Muraki (1993) in the framework of phrase structure grammar (Cf Gazdar et al 1985,Gunji 1987). The semantic representations are based on Montague semantics (Cf Montague 1973,Dowty 1981) with some adjustments