Dependent String Deletion in Japanese Gapping
Yosuke Sato, Masako Maeda
March 2018 

In this paper, we develop a new analysis of gapping in Japanese within Williams's(1997) theory of Coordinate Ellipsis and Dependent Ellipsis, as further articulated in Ackema and Szendröi (2002), in order to investigate the form and function of PF-deletion processes involved in the derivation of this construction. Specifically, we propose that gapping in Japanese is best characterized by Dependent String Deletion, an operation on the strings in the PF component whose applicability is sensitive to the prior application of the Coordinate Ellipsis of the topmost coordinating head (e.g., Cs, Ts, or Ns) in the gapped conjunct. We show that this analysis allows for by far the most empirically adequate account for the major grammatical properties of Japanese gapping, including the island-insensitivity of gapping remnants, the linear order-sensitive distribution of postposition-/case particle-drop in final positions in the gapped clause, the restriction of gapping to true coordination structures headed by sosite ‘and’, and the insensitivity of gapping to syntactic constituency as well as morphological word boundaries in a restricted range of semantically conditioned environments. We also compare our analysis with Mukai's (2003) theory of gapping in Japanese which similarly adopts String Deletion as its critical elliptic process. We identify two empirical areas of comparison – undergeneration and overgeneration – which support our own definition of String Deletion over Mukai’s formulation.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003937 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Ms.
keywords:	gapping, coordinate ellipsis, dependent string deletion, island, non-constituent deletion, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [March 2018]
Downloaded:	438 times

 

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