A Dynamic Syntax Modelling of Postposing in Japanese Narratives

A Dynamic Syntax Modelling of Postposing in Japanese Narratives Tohru Seraku Dept. of Japanese Interpretation and Translation Hankuk University of Foreign Studies seraku@hufs.ac.kr Abstract Japanese is prescriptively said to be verb-final, but it exhibits postposing in colloquial register, where an element is placed after a verb. Based on narrative data, we show that the syntactic type of postposed element is quite diverse and that, contrary to the prevalent, opposing view, Japanese postposing is not restricted to a matrix clause. These issues are addressed in Dynamic Syntax, with the outcome of developing some formal aspects of the framework. 1 Introduction1 Japanese is prescriptively verb-final as in (1)a, but elements may be placed after a verb in colloquial register. In (1)b, sushi-o appears after tabe ‘eat.’ (1) a. Ken-ga sushi-o tabe-ta-yo K-NOM sushi-ACC eat-PAST-FP ‘Ken ate sushi.’ b. Ken-ga Δ tabe-ta-yo, sushi-o K-NOM eat-PAST-FP sushi-ACC The postposed item sushi-o is underlined in (1)b, and the gap is notated as Δ without any theoretical implications. Finally, yo is a final particle (FP) that appears in colloquial register. Japanese postposing has been explored in formal syntax (Takano 2014, Takita 2014) as well as in dialogue/discourse studies (Nomura 2008, Ono 2006). Except for Fujii (1995: 169), grammatical properties of Japanese postposing have not been examined based on naturally-occurring materials. 1 This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2015. We provide narrative data to set out an empirical ground of a grammatical study of postposing: o It seems postposing may occur at an embedded level, contrary to the prevalent, opposing view. o A wider variety of syntactic element may be postposed than has been held in the literature. These syntactic flexibilities pose a challenge for grammar modelling, and we propose a solution in Dynamic Syntax (DS) (Cann et al. 2005). DS has been employed for postposing in several languages (Section 4); still, no analysis has been developed for Japanese presumably because it allows a wider range of items to be postposed. The application to Japanese advances formal aspects of the theory and broadens empirical coverage. 2 Narrative Data Several works have extracted postposing data from spontaneous resources (Nomura 2008), but they tend to avoid the syntactic facets of postposing. In this section, we shed light on grammatical aspects of the phenomenon based on narrative data. Firstly, since Kuno (1978), it has been held that Japanese postposing is restricted to a matrix level (“root-phenomenon”). Whitman (2000: 465) offers data suggesting otherwise. Our narrative data like (2) may also suggest that Japanese postposing is not a root-phenomenon, although it is possible that (2) is a case of indirect speech. (2) [yappari Δ wakatten-na kono-hito]-to [as.expected know-FP this-person]-COMP watashi-wa omou I-TOP think ‘I think this person knows the thing.’ (adapted from {kirishima, p.74}) PACLIC 29 124 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 124 - 132 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Tohru Seraku The postposed element kono-hito ‘this person’ is a subject of the …

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