The Adjunct Test in Japanese Ellipsis at the Prosody-Information Structure Interface
Ryoichiro Kobayashi, Tomoya Tanabe, Yosuke Sato
March 2024 

The so-called adjunct test (Oku 1998; Park 1997) has been used in the literature on Japanese ellipsis as a critical diagnostic test to distinguish between the argument ellipsis and verb-stranding VP-ellipsis analyses of null object constructions. The main purpose of this paper is to show that neither analysis is empirically adequate on its own because both adjunct-inclusive and adjunct-exclusive readings are actually available when prosody and Question under Discussion (Roberts 1996) are taken into consideration. We propose that the availability of the ad-junct-inclusive reading is governed by a tight interaction of the information structure of an elliptical clause with appropriate discourse set ups, an interaction that we model within the Question under Discussion framework. We further argue that our analysis provides an illuminating account for the issue of interspeaker variation concerning the availability of the reading, a point that we show to be verified by the results of our informal acceptability judgement study with 60 native Japanese speakers.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008005 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	adjunct test, prosody, focus, information structure, argument ellipsis, verb-stranding vp-ellipsis, japanese, question under discussion, implicit prosody hypothesis, semantics, syntax, phonology
previous versions:	v1 [March 2024]
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