Psycholinguistic Evidence for the VP-Internal Subject Position in Japanese

The question of whether the subject stays in its thematic position within the VP or moves to Spec, TP is difficult to answer with respect to free word order languages such as Japanese because the surface constituent orders in these languages do not necessarily provide sufficient information to determine syntactic positions. In this article, we present psycholinguistic evidence for the theoretical hypothesis that, in Japanese, the subject must move to Spec, TP in sentences with the subject-objectverb word order, but may stay within the VP in sentences with the object-subject-verb word order.

[1]  Hajime Hoji,et al.  Weak crossover and move α in Japanese , 1983 .

[2]  T. Vance,et al.  Japanese/Korean linguistics , 1999 .

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

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

[5]  Yoshihisa Kitagawa.  Subjects in Japanese and English , 2018 .

[6]  Naoki Fukui.  A theory of category projection and its applications , 1990 .

[7]  M. Saito.  Some asymmetries in Japanese and their theoretical implications , 1985 .

[8]  玉岡 賀津雄,et al.  Cognitive Processing of Japanese Sentences with Ditransitive Verbs , 2004 .

[9]  Shigeru Miyagawa.  Light verbs and the ergative hypothesis , 1989 .

[10]  S. Kuroda.  Whether We Agree or Not: A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese , 1988 .

[11]  Shigeru Miyagawa,et al.  A‐Movement Scrambling and Options without Optionality , 2008 .

[12]  Hiromu Sakai,et al.  The Effects of Phrase-Length Order and Scrambling in the Processing of Visually Presented Japanese Sentences , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[13]  Shigeru Miyagawa,et al.  Locality in Syntax and Floated Numeral Quantifiers in Japanese and Korean , 2005 .

[14]  Stephanie W. Haas.  Construal , 1996, Inf. Process. Manag..

[15]  中山 峰治,et al.  Sentence processing in East Asian languages , 2002 .

[16]  R. Mazuka,et al.  Japanese Sentence Processing , 1996 .

[17]  Hiromu Sakai,et al.  Priority Information Used for the Processing of Japanese Sentences: Thematic Roles, Case Particles or Grammatical Functions? , 2005, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[18]  ALEC MARANTZ,et al.  Generative linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of language , 2005 .

[19]  Hajime Hoji,et al.  Logical form constraints and configurational structures in Japanese , 1985 .

[20]  B. J. Meira.  Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic perspective , 2011 .

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

[22]  E. T. Miyamoto.  Sources of difficulty in processing scrambling in Japanese , 2002 .

[23]  Masatoshi Koizumi,et al.  Issues on the scrambling effects in the processing of Japanese sentences : Reply to Miyamoto and Nakamura (2005) regarding the experimental study by Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004) , 2006 .

[24]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model , 1978, Cognition.

[25]  Mamoru Saito,et al.  A derivational approach to the interpretation of scrambling chains , 2003 .

[26]  Simin Karimi,et al.  Word order and scrambling , 2003 .

[27]  S. Miyagawa,et al.  The EPP, scrambling, and WH-in-situ , 2001 .

[28]  J. Hawkins.  Efficiency and complexity in grammars , 2004 .

[29]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[30]  Edson T. Miyamoto,et al.  フォーラム Unscrambling Some Misconceptions:A Comment on Koizumi and Tamaoka(2004) , 2005 .

[31]  Shigeru Miyagawa,et al.  Locality in Syntax and Floating Numeral Quantifiers , 2007, Linguistic Inquiry.

[32]  Dominique Sportiche,et al.  The position of subjects , 1991 .

[33]  Hiroko Yamashita,et al.  The Effects of Word-Order and Case Marking Information on the Processing of Japanese , 1997 .