(In)flexibility of Constituency in Japanese in Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology

要旨

This dissertation proposes a theory of categorial grammar called Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology.The central feature that distinguishes this theory from the majority of contemporary syntactic theories is that it decouples (without completely segregating) two aspects of syntax-hierarchical organization (reflecting semantic combinatorics) and surface morpho-syntactic realization-which are conflated in the single notion of phrase structure in theories of syntax that take this notion as a primitive.In Chapter 2, I review three phenomena in Japanese-nonconstituent coordination, nonconstituent clefting and four kinds of complementation constructions-that present serious empirical challenges to previous models of generative syntax, whether transformational or nontransformational, and argue that all existing analyses of these constructions in these theories are inadequate.The problems of these previous approaches all stem from the fact that the empirical phenomena considered here constitute cases that deviate from what one might call the 'canonical' mode of phrasal composition, implicitly built into the notion of phrase structure, wherein the surface syntactic constituency transparently reflects the semantically-oriented combinatoric structure.In theories that take the notion of phrase structure as a primitive, such deviations can only be accommodated by means of some kind of extensions to the basic phrase structural component.However, such extensions are often

主題