Speaker: Shin Ishihara (J.W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main)
Time: Friday, May 6, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE THE ROOM)
Title: On the Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese: Implicit Prosody and
Argument Structure Parsing
Abstract:
In some syntactic constructions in Japanese, more than one constituent
can move together to a certain syntactic position. One example is the
cleft construction: Japanese clefts allow multiple constituents to
appear in the focus position (`It is x, y that … t(x) … t(y)…’).
It has often been claimed that such constituents must originate from
the same clause, i.e., they must be clause-mates (= the Clause-Mate
Condition, the CMC). This condition has often been analyzed as a
syntactic constraint that strictly bans any syntactic derivation
violating it. There are, however, cases where the CMC can be obviated.
For example, if the cleft sentence with multiple foci is a wh-question
(`Who(x), what(y) is it that … t(x) … t(y) …?’), the sentence
acceptability improves compared to its declarative counterpart. So
far, no account has been proposed that can explain both the CMC and
the CMC obviation cases.In this talk, I claim that the Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese is
not a syntactic constraint, and propose that the CMC effect comes from
the influence of `implicit prosody’ on sentence parsing. Adopting the
Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002), I will propose a
parsing principle which imposes a certain bias on the argument
structure comprehension according to the prosodic phrasing in the
implicit prosody. This analysis can explain both the CMC effect in
clefts with multiple focus constituents and its obviation effect under
certain conditions (including interrogatives) in a parallel fashion.The analysis also makes further predictions on potential parsing
difficulties in other constructions such as long-distance scrambling.
It will be suggested that some of the mysterious restrictions found in
long-distance scrambling in Japanese (e.g., ban on long-distance
scrambling to a sentence-medial position, ban on scrambling of
nominative subjects) are related to the parsing difficulty caused by
the implicit prosody.