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Abstract

This paper presents evidence that Japanese has prosodic scrambling of phonological phrases (ϕ) in addition to the well-studied syntactic scrambling of XPs. All cases of scrambling in Japanese involve fronting constituents, be they syntactic XPs or phonological ϕs. If the syntax cannot move XPs, the phonology is forced to move their prosodic equivalents: these ϕs are fronted to the left edge of the intonational phrase (ɩ) that contains them and join to make a single recursive ϕ, the domain for tonal downstep (Itô and Mester 2012, 2013). Syntactic scrambling ‘bleeds’ prosodic scrambling, adding support for a uni-directional, feed-forward model of syntax-phonology interactions. Syntactic scrambling fronts XPs and obeys syntactic conditions on movement, and the scrambled XP exhibits interpretive effects in its surface position. Prosodic scrambling fronts ϕs and is blind to syntactic conditions on movement, and the scrambled ϕs are interpreted in situ, as expected.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. See Hirotani (2005) for related discussion of processing constraints for prosodic packaging in single and multiple scrambling in Japanese.

  2. Arguably, Koizumi (2000) could analyze (5) in the following way: the object purezento-o ‘present-acc’ is first scrambled out of the VP (and the verb kau undergoes overt verb raising), and then the remnant VP undergoes long-distance scrambling. Such a derivation, however, results in a proper binding condition violation like (ii) (Saito 1989; Hiraiwa 2010):

    1. (i)
      figure f
    1. (ii)
      figure g

    We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  3. This precludes ‘early Spell-Out’ analyses of scrambling, which send the scrambled XPs one-by-one to the phonological component for so-called ‘PF scrambling’ (Fukui and Kasai 2004; van Gelderen 2003).

  4. We do not deal with so-called ‘VP-internal scrambling’, since it is not clear whether variable DO–IO order VP-internally is derived by movement or base-generation.

  5. Note that this also excludes ‘multiple scrambling’ cases in which one of the XPs scrambles syntactically, and the other scrambles prosodically. As we show in the next section, grammatical instances of ‘multiple long-distance scrambling’ do not obey syntactic conditions or have the same interpretive effects of single syntactic scrambling. This suggests that good cases of ‘multiple scrambling’ cannot involve any form of syntactic movement.

  6. Note that ‘heaviness’ does not play a role in determining whether a string scrambles syntactically or prosodically in Japanese. The determining factor is whether the material can scramble as a syntactic constituent or not. If not, the material targeted for scrambling is scrambled in phonology and combined into a single ϕ.

  7. Note that there is no need to appeal to anything like the Earliness Principle (Pesetsky 1989) to derive this effect, since an architecture in which syntax derivationally precedes and feeds phonology will derive this effect automatically. We also avoid the complication of appealing to reference sets that compare different derivational outputs which apply scrambling in syntax or in phonology, as operations in syntax and phonology are not comparable for the purposes of economy; there is no sense in which syntactic scrambling is ‘less costly’ than prosodic scrambling or vice-versa, and thus there is no need to appeal to notions such as Earliness or Procrastinate (Chomsky 1993, 1995), which would decide between the two operations.

  8. Note that (36a, b) are both acceptable if kare ‘he’ refers to someone other than John.

  9. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, another striking contrast predicted by our analysis can be created by adding a modifier like riyuumo-naku ‘without any reason’ at the beginning of a sentence like (29b):

    1. (i)
      figure aj

    When riyuu-mo naku ‘without any reason’ is interpreted as modifying the relative clause (ia), (i) can still involve syntactic scrambling and thus no Condition C violation emerges. When riyuu-mo naku ‘without any reason’ is interpreted as modifying the intermediate clause (ib), (i) must involve prosodic scrambling, leading to a Condition C violation. Although the judgment is subtle, there exists such a contrast, as predicted by our analysis.

  10. The acceptability judgment on the wide scope reading of the universal quantifier daremo ‘everyone’ in (35) varies among speakers. Seven Japanese native speakers were consulted regarding the scope reading for these cases; four of the speakers found the wide scope reading of daremo ‘everyone’ acceptable and three of them found it marginal. It should be noted, however, that even for those who find the wide scope reading of daremo ‘everyone’ in (37) marginal, there is a clear contrast between (37) and (38). The wide scope reading of daremo ‘everyone’ in (37) is much worse than the one in (38), which needs an explanation. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.

  11. A similar effect is observed in Classical Greek (Agbayani and Golston 2010), where pervasive left-branch extraction occurs under movement of prosodic constituents in phonology. Phonological movement is expected to be sensitive to phonological conditions (to which syntactic movement would be immune). Agbayani and Golston show that this expectation is confirmed for Classical Greek, in which phonological movement is sensitive to the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). Prosodic scrambling in Japanese is also expected to be sensitive to phonological conditions like the OCP; we have not yet found this effect in Japanese.

  12. The prosodic scrambling analysis is distinct from so-called ‘PF movement’ proposals, which posit for the most part post-Spell-Out movement of syntactic XPs (Chomsky 1995; Ueyama 1999; Hayashishita 2000; Sauerland and Elbourne 2002; van Gelderen 2003; and Fukui and Kasai 2004).

  13. Note also that in Hoji’s (2003) analysis, his ‘PF representation’ still feeds information to LF in terms of variable binding. Our prosodic scrambling, on the other hand, is purely phonological in the sense that it does not have any effect on variable binding at all.

  14. An anonymous reviewer asks of (72) whether the judgment remains the same if the order of the constituents within the ϕ is reversed (i.e., *saibansho-ni Mettu-sae-o*). It seems to us that it does, though the judgment is subtle.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank four anonymous NLLT reviewers for very helpful comments. Portions of this paper were presented at ICEAL 2, FAJL 5, and seminars on Linguistic Theory and Japanese Language at MIT. We would like to thank the audiences at these conferences for helpful comments and discussions on earlier versions of this paper, especially Shin Fukuda, Junko Itô, Armin Mester, Shigeru Miyagawa, Mamoru Saito, Lisa Selkirk, and Satoshi Tomioka. We would also like to thank Hidehito Hoshi, Norvin Richards and Hideaki Yamashita for helpful comments on a draft of this paper, as well as Tomoko Kozasa for help with phonetic analysis and native speaker judgments. Remaining errors and omissions are, of course, the sole responsibility of the authors. This work was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under grant Scientific Research C 26370578 to Ishii.

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Agbayani, B., Golston, C. & Ishii, T. Syntactic and prosodic scrambling in Japanese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33, 47–77 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9252-x

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