Abstract
This article discusses the nature of apparently surprising phenomena found in Japanese. Two or more elements of a sentence, excluding the verb, can appear rather freely in the focus position of Japanese cleft constructions. These elements cannot possibly be considered to form a base-generated constituent and hence the existence of such "surprising constituents" poses an interesting problem for syntactic theory. It is shown that an approach that appeals to overt verb raising to account for surprising constituents is inadequate for a number of reasons. An alternative approach is proposed in which surprising constituents are formed by "oblique movement" (movement of an element to another element that does not dominate it). Consequences of this proposal are explored for related theoretical and empirical domains.
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Takano, Y. Surprising Constituents. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 11, 243–301 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016011311546
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016011311546