Noun Phrases in Japanese and English: A Study in Syntax, Learnability and Acquisition

In Japanese, the genitive Case marker "no" is inserted after NP and PP prenominal modifiers, but not after relative clauses. Saito (1982) and Fukui (1986), among others, propose a "no"-insertion rule to accountfor this fact. Harada (1980) and Clancy (1985) observe that some Japanese speaking children, at around 2 years old, insert "no" even after relative clauses, as shown in (1). (1) *usatyan ga tabeta no ninzin rabbit Nom ate (*Gen) carrot (the carrot that the rabbit ate) (Harada, 1980) This hypothesis presents a hypothesis as to what the overgenerated "no" is, and as to how children retreat from this overgeneration. In order to attain answers to these questions, I first discuss in Chapter 2the syntactic properties of several types of "no" in Japanese. In particular, I argue that "no"s of categories N and C exist, contrary to Kitagawa and Ross (1982), and Fukui (1986), but as suggested in Okutsu (1974) and Hoji (1990). This sets up three candidates for the overgenerated "no" in (1): the genitive Case marker, "no" as N and "no"as C. Chapter 3 deals with the syntax of Japanese relative clauses. I first extend Perlmutter's analysis along the lines of Saito's (1985) analysis of topicalization, and argue that Japanese relative clauses maybut need not involve movement. Based on this assumption, I draw two conclustions: (i) Japanese has pro PP for time and place adjuncts, and (ii) Japanese relative clauses are IP (the IP hypothesis). With the syntactic analysis in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 addresses the questions concerning the overgenerated "no" in (1). On the basis offurther