An analysis of the postposing construction in Japanese.
Mutsuko Endo Simon · Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 1989
This dissertation analyzes the postposing construction in Japanese--sentences in which one or more constituents appear following the matrix predicate. Two types of postposing are observed in my data, which are primarily distinguished by the presence or absence of a pause and a break in the intonation contour. It is argued that an "afterthought" analysis, which has been offered in the past, is inadequate and that at least the no-pause type of postposing should be regarded as movement. An analysis of the postposing construction is important, as well as interesting, for several reasons. First, postposed sentences appear to contradict the general claim that Japanese is a 'rigid' verb-final language. Second, the analysis presented here reaffirms recent findings that rules of Move-alpha do apply in this language. Third, an interaction of phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors constrains the shape and use of postposed sentences, which suggests that all these factors must be taken into consideration in our analysis. and finally, despite its common usage in colloquial speech, there have been few attempts in the literature to account for this construction. My syntactic account of postposing adopts the framework of the Theory of Government and Binding (GB). Specifically, I analyze it as a root transformation that adjoins a maximal projection of all categories to the highest S$\\sp\\prime$. I argue that a movement analysis is superior to a base-generation or construal analysis and that the former is compatible with the basic principles of GB, such as X-bar, Government, Binding, Theta, Case and Bounding Theories. Semantically, it is shown that both the degree of transparency of the verb and parsing factors have effects on the acceptability of postposed sentences. Pragmatically, while some sentences of the pause type express an "afterthought" (as we underst and the term in its prototypical sense), the motivation of others are not so clear. Sentences of the no-pause type, on the other h and , can all be analyzed as reflecting a general principle operative in informal, unplanned speech, especially under time pressure, whereby important or urgent information is verbalized earlier in a sentence and secondary information at the end.