6: The Challenge of Japanese
Lutz Marten · 2005
This chapter begins by setting out the perplexing properties of Japanese as illustrative of verb final languages, and posing the challenge of finding a grammar formalism which expresses the properties of these languages in the same terms as the more familiar head initial languages and without undue complexity in the analysis. The dynamics of setting out partial tree structures incrementally and building up propositional structure as further information becomes available has applied in exactly the same terms, and with essentially the same mechanisms as in those languages. With structurally fixed subject relations in language like English, its application would seem to have to be internal to the verb phrase, and indeed many subject verb object ordering languages display much freer constituent order after the verb, redolent of short scrambling.Keywords: English; grammar formalism; Japanese; propositional structure; verb final language