Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective

要旨

Comparative syntax has been playing an increasingly important role in research in syntactic theory. Japanese has also been discussed in comparative perspective, but the comparison has been mostly with English. This volume aims to pursue the comparative syntax of Japanese with other Asian languages and, by doing so, to make original contributions to syntactic theory. The first three chapters examine the noun phrase structures in Chinese and Japanese and try to attribute their differences to the head parameter while accounting for their similarities at the same time. The next two chapters take up ellipsis, investigating the distributions of argument ellipsis in Japanese, Chinese, and Turkish and pursuing their relation to the absence of ϕ -feature agreement; and comparing ellipsis in Japanese and Korean and proposing a microparameter that accounts for their differences. Chapter 6 sheds new light on “rightward scrambling” in Japanese by comparing it with the parallel phenomenon in Turkish and presenting an original analysis. Chapters 7 and 8 explore the interpretive mechanisms for wh-phrases in situ by a detailed comparison of Chinese and Japanese. The last two chapters compare the distributions of nonnominative subjects in Japanese and languages of India, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. These pioneering works pinpoint and offer analyses for the differences.

主題