What Can Child Japanese Tell Us about the Syntax of Scrambling?*

This study is an attempt to determine the validity of two competing syntactic analyses of the Direct Object (DO) – Indirect Object (IO) order within the VP in Japanese, based on data from child language acquisition. One analysis suggests that this order is derived from the IO – DO order via application of the movement operation called scrambling (e.g. Hoji 1985, Nemoto 1993, Saito 1994, Tada 1993, Takano 1996, Yatsushiro 1999). The other analysis claims that both orders can be base-generated (Miyagawa 1997). We will show that, under certain acquisitional assumptions, these two analyses make different predictions for child Japanese, and that experimental results bear out the predictions of the movement analysis. The broader implication of this study is that the time course of child language acquisition has the potential to be an important testing ground for syntactic theories.