PROSODY, SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS OF <i>WH</i>-QUESTIONS IN JAPANESE

要旨

It is well-known that the acceptability judgments reported on Subjacency and some related effects in Japanese are fuzzy, unstable and variable. I will attempt to demonstrate that we can bring back order to the chaos in this research area if we, first, pursue a syntactic analysis designed to simultaneously capture prosodic and semantic aspects of Wh-questions in Japanese, and second, appeal to extra-grammatical aspects such as pragmatics and processing to account for certain performance biases that hinder the straightforward reflection of grammar in language users' acceptability judgments on Subjacency examples. It is concluded that even the study of formal aspects of grammar must be conducted with much more careful attention to a larger context of language than is generally exercised.

主題