When ‘What’ Means ‘Why’: On Accusative wh-adjuncts in Japanese

This paper considers properties of the Japanese Accusative wh-adjunct \u27nani-o (what-Acc)\u27 (Kurafuji, 1996, 1997; Ochi, 1999) in sentences such as Kare-wa nani-o sawai-dei-ru no? (lit. What is he making a noise?) . Although the Accusative wh-adjunct \u27nani-o\u27 is usually translated in the same way as \u27naze (why)\u27, there are a number of differences between them: (i) \u27Nani-o\u27 has an animacy restriction on the subject, (ii) it has some special speaker’s inference, and (iii) it is incompatible with sluicing (Ochi, 1999). We will explain the properties (i) and (ii) by claiming that Accusative wh-adjuncts are base-generated in a functional projection FP, which is related to speaker\u27s illocutionary force. We attribute the property (iii) to Fox and Lasnik\u27s (2003) parallelism condition on sluicing; because Accusative wh-adjuncts are base-generated in a different position from other reason adjuncts, they do not satisfy parallelism with the corresponding adjunct in the antecedent clause. By clarifying the syntactic positions of the two types of reason adjuncts, we attempt to contribute to the typological study of adjuncts

Feature‐Splitting Internal Merge: Improper Movement, Intervention, and the A/A′ Distinction

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86827/1/j.1467-9612.2010.00149.x.pd

On the Nature of Root and Adjunct Clauses

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Outer/inner morphology: The dichotomy of Japanese renyoo verbs and nouns

This paper investigates the morpho-phonological differences between the nominal and verbal conjugational forms of renyoo (a preverbal form) in terms of (i) idiosyncrasy, (ii) productivity, and (iii) accent shift. All of these properties indicate that the two renyoo morphemes appear in different syntactic positions: with renyoo-verbs, the root first merges with the categorizer v and then with the REN(yoo) head, whereas with renyoo-nouns, the root directly merges with the categorizer n, which is phonologically realized as the renyoo morpheme. Our analysis consequently supports Marantz/s (2007) inner/outer morphology division within a word, and also provides implications for Chomsky's (2013) {H, H} Labeling Algorithm (Sugimura & Obata 2014)

Parameters as Third Factor Timing Optionality

Parameters as Third Factor Timing Optionalit