An Investigation of Exclamatives in English and Japanese: Syntax and Sentence Processing

Title of Dissertation / Thesis: AN INVESTIGATION OF EXCLAMATIVES IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE: SYNTAX AND SENTENCE PROCESSING Hajime Ono, Ph.D, 2006 Dissertation / Thesis Directed By: Professor Howard Lasnik, Department of Linguistics This dissertation is a case study of the syntax of the left periphery, using exclamatives in English and Japanese. In the first part, I discuss exclamatives in Japanese in detail by focusing on the properties of the exclamative wh-phrases and particles that function as licensors for wh-phrases in exclamatives. We argue that licensing exclamatives involves at least three functional heads: Finite, Focus, and Mood. Especially, the necessity of the Mood head differentiates exclamatives from interrogatives. On the other hand, we claim that having these three functional projections does not type the clause as exclamative, and show that the presence of a wh-phrase of a distinct form is in fact a crucial part of the clause-typing for exclamation. This conclusion supports the claim that clause type should not be directly encoded into syntax as an independent functional category. The second part of dissertation deals with English exclamatives. We show that sluicing is available in English exclamatives, suggesting that focus is playing a role for the availability of sluicing, assuming that both interrogatives and exclamatives involve focus. Another conclusion about English exclamatives is that exclamative wh-clauses are licensed, not by selection, but by being c-commanded by a factive operator or a factive predicate. This goes against the traditional observation; our conclusion is empirically justified based on the observation that it is possible to license exclamative wh-clauses by a non-local licensor. We argue that this property is similar to what has been observed for the aggressively non-D-linked wh-phrases, accounting for the distribution and behavior of those non-standard wh-phrases. Finally, we investigate how Japanese exclamatives are processed by native speakers of Japanese with an online self-paced reading study and two off-line sentence fragment completion studies on the processing of wh-exclamative sentences in Japanese. These studies investigate the real-time formation of sentential structures with higher functional categories, and show that the parser immediately engages to build syntactic structures with discourseoriented higher functional projections before coming across the head, favoring the incremental processing model. AN INVESTIGATION OF EXCLAMATIVES IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE: SYNTAX AND SENTENCE PROCESSING

[1]  Xavier Villalba.  The Right Edge of Exclamative Sentences in Catalan , 2001 .

[2]  Noam Chomsky.  Derivation by phase , 1999 .

[3]  泰介 西垣内.  Quantification in syntax , 1987 .

[4]  G. Cinque.  Adverbs and functional heads , 1999 .

[5]  Fusa Katada.  The LF representation of anaphors , 1991 .

[6]  Peggy Speas.  Person and Point of View in Navajo , 2000 .

[7]  D. Cresti.  Extraction and reconstruction , 1995 .

[8]  D. Elliott,et al.  The grammar of emotive and exclamatory sentences in English , 1971 .

[9]  L. Rizzi.  The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery , 1997 .

[10]  Daiko Takahashi,et al.  Determiner Raising and Scope Shift , 2002, Linguistic Inquiry.

[11]  赤羽 仁志,et al.  ON INNER ISLANDS , 2006 .

[12]  J. Woolley,et al.  Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. , 1982, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[13]  Taisuke Nishigauchi,et al.  Quantification in the theory of grammar , 1990 .

[14]  L. Karttunen.  Syntax and Semantics of Questions , 1977 .

[15]  Marcel den Dikken,et al.  On the morphosyntax of wh -movement , 2003 .

[16]  Naoki Fukui.  LF extraction of naze: Some theoretical implications , 1988 .

[17]  Hans Bennis,et al.  The meaning of structure: the wat voor construction revisited , 1995 .

[18]  David Pesetsky,et al.  T-to-C Movement: Causes and Consequences , 2000 .

[19]  泰介 西垣内,et al.  'Point of View' and Phrase Structure , 1999 .

[20]  A. Giannakidou.  Affective Dependencies , 1999 .

[21]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  On Wh-Movement , 1977 .

[22]  Anthony S. Kroch,et al.  Amount Quantification, Referentiality, and Long Wh-Movement , 1998 .

[23]  D. Pesetsky.  Phrasal Movement and Its Kin , 2000 .

[24]  C. T. James Huang,et al.  Logophoricity, attitudes, and Ziji at the interface , 2000 .

[25]  Henriëtte de Swart,et al.  Intervention Effects, Monotonicity and Scope , 1992 .

[26]  Jason Merchant,et al.  Swiping in Germanic , 2002 .

[27]  Xavier Villalba,et al.  An exceptional exclamative sentence type in Romance , 2003 .

[28]  Christopher Kennedy,et al.  Attributive Comparative Deletion , 2000 .

[29]  Danny Fox,et al.  Economy and Semantic Interpretation , 1999 .

[30]  FRANZ-JOSEF D’AVIS,et al.  On the interpretation of wh-clauses in exclamative environments , 2002 .

[31]  A. Watanabe.  Wh and operator constructions in Japanese , 2003 .

[32]  T. Yoshida,et al.  Question marker drop in Japanese , 1996 .

[33]  Marica De Vincenzi,et al.  Filler-gap dependencies in a null subject language: Referential and nonreferential WHs , 1991 .

[34]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Minimalist inquiries : the framework , 1998 .

[35]  Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng,et al.  On the typology of wh-questions , 1997 .

[36]  Yuji Takano,et al.  Symmetry in Syntax: Merge and Demerge , 1998 .

[37]  A. Weinberg,et al.  Processing filler-gap dependencies in a head-final language , 2004 .

[38]  John Robert Ross,et al.  Constraints on variables in syntax , 1967 .

[39]  Junko Shimoyama,et al.  Wh -constructions in Japanese , 2001 .

[40]  Marga Reis.  On sentence types in German: an enquiry into the relationship between grammar and pragmatics , 1999 .

[41]  Laurie A. Stowe,et al.  Parsing WH-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location , 1986 .

[42]  J. Merchant.  The syntax of silence , 2001 .

[43]  Ken Hiraiwa,et al.  Nominative-Genitive Conversion Revisited , 2000 .

[44]  Yasuo Ishii,et al.  Operators and Empty Categories in Japanese , 1991 .

[45]  Jon Sprouse,et al.  The Accent Projection Principle: Why the Hell Not? , 2006 .

[46]  Steven Abney,et al.  The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect , 1972 .

[47]  渡邊 明.  Wh-in-situ, subjacency, and chain formation , 1992 .

[48]  Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach.  Spanish exclamatives and the interpretation of the left periphery , 2001 .

[49]  C. L. Hamblin.  QUESTIONS IN MONTAGUE ENGLISH , 1976 .

[50]  Carol L. Tenny,et al.  Evidentiality, Experiencers, and the Syntax of sentience in Japanese , 2006 .

[51]  William A. Ladusaw,et al.  Sluicing and logical form , 1995 .

[52]  Kazue Takeda.  Multiple headed structures , 2000 .

[53]  Jorge Hankamer,et al.  Deep and surface anaphora , 1993 .

[54]  Yurie Hara,et al.  GRAMMAR OF KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION: JAPANESE DISCOURSE ITEMS AT INTERFACES , 2006 .

[55]  K. Sakuma.  The structure of the Japanese language , 1951 .

[56]  Daiko Takahashi,et al.  Movement of Wh-phrases in Japanese , 1993 .

[57]  P. Sells.  Aspects of logophoricity , 1987 .

[58]  N. A. Mccawley,et al.  The structure of the Japanese language , 1973 .

[59]  A. Lobeck.  Ellipsis: Functional Heads, Licensing, and Identification , 1995 .

[60]  Joan Bresnan,et al.  Syntax of the Comparative Clause Construction in English , 1973 .

[61]  Norbert Corver,et al.  The syntax of left branch extractions , 1990 .

[62]  S.-Y. Kuroda,et al.  Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language , 1965 .

[63]  Norbert Corver,et al.  The Internal Syntax of the Dutch Extended Adjectival Projection , 1997 .

[64]  Minoru Nakau,et al.  Sentential complementation in Japanese. , 1975 .

[65]  黒田 成幸.  Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language , 1965 .

[66]  J. Zwart.  The Minimalist Program , 1998, Journal of Linguistics.

[67]  Howard Lasnik,et al.  Step by step : essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik , 2000 .

[68]  Yuki Kamide,et al.  Incremental Pre-Head Attachment in Japanese Parsing. , 1999 .

[69]  Joseph E. Emonds,et al.  A unified theory of syntactic categories , 1985 .

[70]  Henk C. van Riemsdijk,et al.  A case study in syntactic markedness: The binding nature of prepositional phrases , 1978 .

[71]  Lipták Anikó,et al.  On the syntax of wh-items in Hungarian , 2001 .

[72]  K. Hale,et al.  Ken Hale: A Life in Language , 2001 .

[73]  Christopher Kennedy,et al.  Polar Opposition and the Ontology of ‘Degrees’ , 2001 .

[74]  Ken Hiraiwa,et al.  On Nominative-Genitive Conversion * , 2000 .

[75]  Yuki Johnson.  Modality and the Japanese Language , 2003 .

[76]  J. Frampton,et al.  RELATIVIZED MINIMALITY, A REVIEW , 1991 .

[77]  Janet Dean Fodor,et al.  Natural language parsing: How can grammars help parsers? , 1985 .

[78]  Katalin É. Kiss,et al.  Discourse configurational languages , 1995 .

[79]  Edson T Miyamoto,et al.  Case Markers as Clause Boundary Inducers in Japanese , 2002, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[80]  Asako Uchibori,et al.  The syntax of subjunctive complements: Evidence from Japanese , 2000 .

[81]  Ken Hiraiwa,et al.  Missing Links: Cleft, Sluicing, and "No da" Construction in Japanese * , 2002 .

[82]  Masaya Yoshida,et al.  Real-Time Computation of Japanese Exclamatives and the Strength of Locality Biases in Sentence Comprehension (特集 文理解の認知メカニズム) , 2006 .

[83]  John Whitman,et al.  The category of relative clauses in Japanese, with reference to Korean , 1995 .

[84]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Conditions on transformations , 1971 .

[85]  Hideki Kishimoto,et al.  Binding of Indeterminate Pronouns and Clause Structure in Japanese , 2001, Linguistic Inquiry.

[86]  P. Materna,et al.  Logical Form , 2005 .

[87]  Peter W. Culicover,et al.  Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition , 1999 .

[88]  Howard Lasnik.  On Feature Strength: Three Minimalist Approaches to Overt Movement , 1999, Linguistic Inquiry.

[89]  H. Ura.  Checking theory and grammatical functions in universal grammar , 2000 .

[90]  N. Corver,et al.  Much-support as a last resort , 1997 .

[91]  J. Grimshaw.  Projection, heads, and optimality , 1997 .

[92]  Justin Fitzpatrick.  The Whys and How Comes of Presupposition and NPI Licensing in Questions , 2005 .

[93]  Juan Uriagereka,et al.  Derivations: Exploring the Dynamics of Syntax , 2002 .

[94]  Christopher Kennedy.  Comparison and Polar Opposition , 1997 .

[95]  Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck,et al.  Ellipsis in Dutch dialects , 2004 .

[96]  Raffaella Paul Zanuttini,et al.  Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax-Semantics Interface , 2003 .

[97]  A. Watanabe.  Subjacency and S-structure movement of wh-in-situ , 1992 .

[98]  Cheng-Teh James Huang,et al.  Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar , 1998 .

[99]  Guglielmo Cinque,et al.  Types of Ā-dependencies , 1990 .

[100]  K Abels,et al.  Successive cyclicity, anti-locality, and adposition stranding , 2003 .

[101]  Howard Lasnik,et al.  On the nature of proper government , 1990 .

[102]  Marica de Vincenzi,et al.  Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian , 1991 .

[103]  Sigrid Beck,et al.  Quantified structures as barriers for LF movement , 1996 .

[104]  A. Watanabe,et al.  Nominative-genitive conversion and agreement in Japanese: A cross-linguistic perspective , 1996 .

[105]  C. Heycock.  Asymmetries in reconstruction , 1995 .