Head movement in an agglutinative SOV language

要旨

Title of Document: HEAD MOVEMENT IN AN AGGLUTINATIVE SOV LANGUAGE Shintaro Hayashi, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Tomohiro Fujii, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences The goal of this thesis is to argue for head movement in Japanese, which is necessarily (and notoriously) ‘string-vacuous’ due to the head-final character of the language. I show that a couple of discrepancies between complement te-clauses and adjunct te-clauses cannot be satisfactorily captured unless head movement is resorted to. It is also demonstrated that (what I refer to as) NJV clauses and VN clauses, which have been traditionally distinguished from each other in the literature, exhibit asymmetries under ellipsis phenomena. I argue that the asymmetries are rooted in predicate raising, commonly referred to as verb movement in the literature. HEAD MOVEMENT IN AN AGGLUTINATIVE SOV LANGUAGE

主題