Scrambling of Wh-phrases in Japanese

Scrambling of Wh-phrases in Japanese* Paul Law City University of Hong Kong paul.law@cityu.edu.hk Abstract. Despite the a priori desiratum of assimilating the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions in Japanese to that in English, empirical evidence shows that overt displacement of wh-phrases in Japanese is not the same as overt wh-movement in English. The syntax of wh-phrases in Japanese is essentially the same as that of non-wh-phrases. Failure of scope reconstruction in certain cases is not evidence for a constraint applying specifically to wh-movement but is due to the computation of the available readings, the semantic effect or prosody. Keywords: wh-movement, scrambling, scope of displaced wh-phrases, reconstruction. 1 Introduction An obvious difference between English and Japanese, among many others, is that wh-phrases in non-echo single-wh questions in English must appear in a left-peripheral position, while those in Japanese need not:1 (1) a. John bought a book. b. Whati did John buy ti? c. John bought what? (echo question only) (2) a. John-ga hon-o katta (koto). -NOM book-ACC bought fact ‘John bought a book.’ b. John-ga nani-o katta no? -NOM book-ACC bought Q ‘What did John buy?’ c. Nani-oi John-ga ti katta no? One of the many issues that arise in the comparative study of English and Japanese is to what extent the two languages are alike, despite their superficial differences. Specifically, we might wonder whether the example in (2c) can be likened to the English example in (1b) in that the wh-phrase appears in the same SpecCP position. I argue that although Japanese and English wh-questions are alike in some respects, e.g., the scope of the wh-phrase is determined by the relation with a [+WH] C, the derivation and  I am indebted to Yurie Hara, Masayuki Hirata, Tomio Hirose for sharing their native judgment of Japanese with me. I thank three reviewers for PACLIC24 for comments and suggestions. All errors of fact and interpretation are my responsibility. 1 As is common practice in formal studies of Japanese syntax, koto ‘fact’ is added at the end of a declarative sentence to avoid the unnaturalness of a matrix clause without a topic marked by the suffice wa. For simplicity’s sake, koto is mostly ignored in the translation. Abbreviations: ACC=accusative, C=complementizer, DAT=dative, GEN=genitive, NOM=nominative, PASS=passive, Q=question, TOP=topic. Copyright 2010 by Paul Law PACLIC 24 Proceedings 463 syntactic structure of Japanese wh-questions, including the one like (2c) that looks very much like the question in (1b), are not exactly like those in English. Specifically, I claim that overt syntactic movement of wh-phrases in Japanese is the result of scrambling, the same operation that applies to non-wh-phrases. The lack of scope reconstruction in certain cases is not due to a constraint on phrases undergoing wh-movement but to a combination of factors having to do with the computation of the available readings, the semantic effect and prosody. 2 Local Scrambling and the Superiority Effect The similarity of (1b) and (2c) invites the imagination that the two examples in fact have the same syntactic structure, as in …

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