Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese: An Incremental Grammar Perspective.
Tohru Seraku · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2017
This article defends an "incremental grammar" view, where syntactic puzzles are accounted for in terms of how a sentence is parsed online.To this end, we focus on the Multiple Nominative Construction (MNC) in Japanese, offering new data involving "rightward displacements."The displacement patterns of nominative NPs are shown to follow from the way an MNC string is parsed left-to-right.Our incremental account is formalised in Dynamic Syntax, with the upshot that only the licit ordering of nominative NPs in MNC leads to a legitimate structure update.