| Research Abstract |
Syntax : The outstanding properties of Japanese scrambling were made clear through extensive joint research with G. Grewendorf, J.Sabel (Germanic languages), Z.Boskovic (Slavic languages), S.Miyagawa (Altaic languages), and J. Jayaseelan (Dravidian languages). The most fundamental among those properties is that the movement is not reflected in semantic representation. A concrete analysis of Japanese scrambling was proposed on the basis of this result. The analysis develops the minimalist theory so that chains are interpreted cyclically by deletion of syntactic features, and it successfully explains the major properties of Japanese scrambling, including the radical reconstruction property, the mixed A/A' nature of the landing site, and the strict obedience of the trace to the proper binding condition. Finally, a proposal was made to explain why Japanese, and not other languages, has this type of, scrambling. The hypothesis is that this is due to the fact that Japanese employs 'Merge' in its purest form in phrase structure construction. This accounts for other unique phenomena in Japanese as well, for example, the light verb construction and extensive argument ellipsis.
Acquisition : Some experiments were conducted on the acquisition of scrambling with 2〜4 year old subjects. The results indicate that scrambling is already acquired at a very early stage (about 2 years of age), in contradiction with the findings reported in the literature. In particular, the results show clearly that scrambling is acquired much earlier than passive, and this supports the hypothesis that scrambling is not feature-driven. This conclusion is in perfect harmony with and hence, supports the proposal in the syntactic research that Japanese has scrambling with unique properties because of the way it employs'Merge' in phrase-structure building.
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