Abstract
In this paper, I argue that a certain case of scrambling of Wh-phrases counts as syntactic Wh-movement in Japanese: Specifically, I argue that long-distance scrambling of a Wh-phrase to a clause headed by a [+ WH] COMP behaves exactly like Wh-movement. I defend this hypothesis by showing (i) that such movement lacks LF ‘undoing’ effects, a quite surprising fact considering that scrambling can be freely undone in LF, and (ii) that it exhibits the Superiority effects. This observation provides support for Mahajan's (1990) proposal that long-distance scrambling, unlike local scrambling, is uniformly A′-movement. Further, I show, on the basis of LF undoing effects, that multiple Wh-movement is possible in Japanese, and argue that this fact supports Kuroda's (1988) ‘multiple SPEC’ analysis for the phrase structure of Japanese.
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I would like to thank Howard Lasnik and Mamoru Saito for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to two anonymousNLLT reviewers for helpful comments and criticisms. Comments from and discussions with Jun Abe, Sam Epstein, Akira Kikuchi, Laurel LaPorte-Grimes, Alec Marantz, and Masaru Nakamura were also helpful in improving this paper. All the remaining errors are, of course, my own.
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Takahashi, D. Movement of Wh-phrases in Japanese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 11, 655–678 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993016
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00993016