Simpler Syntax for Scope in Japanese: A Case Study with Obligatory Wide Scope Phenomena
Tomoya Tanabe, Ryoichiro Kobayashi, Yosuke Sato
June 2024 

New title: "The Obligatory Wide Scope Phenomena in Japanese: A Myth?" This paper tackles the problem of puzzling wide scope phenomena in Japanese, which have been extensively discussed in the Japanese literature including Goro (2007) and Shibata (2015). Relevant data on the scope relations between disjunction/focus particles and negation in transitive sentences are reexamined. A careful examination of the syntax-discourse-prosody interactions reveals that the wide scope reading of these scope elements is not obligatory. Hence, the syntactic analyses that have been proposed to account for the apparent wide scope phenomena are neither necessary nor correct. Instead, this paper proposes that the object NPs with the scope elements can undergo reconstruction. Based on the present findings, this study reemphasizes the methodological moral that extra-syntactic factors must be carefully controlled when we study syntax (Kitagawa and Fodor 2003).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008102 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	implicit prosody, default prosody, scope of negation, disjunction, focus particles, japanese, semantics, syntax, phonology
previous versions:	v1 [April 2024]
Downloaded:	1964 times

 

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