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Apparent Parasitic Gaps and Null Arguments in Japanese*

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Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it aims to point out that though what appear to be parasitic gaps exist in Japanese, they behave differently from their English counterpart in crucial ways; second, it argues that the existence of those apparent parasitic gaps in Japanese is closely related to the possibility of null arguments in the language. The argument crucially relies on the proposal, independently made in the literature, that certain cases of null arguments involve ellipsis rather than empty pronouns.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Generative Linguistics, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576, Japan

    Daiko Takahashi

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  1. Daiko Takahashi
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Correspondence to Daiko Takahashi.

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* The material reported here was presented at the 6th LEHIA International Workshop in Linguistics, held at University of the Basque Country at Vitoria-Gasteiz in July, 2003, at an intensive graduate course in comparative syntax at Yokohama National University in January, 2004, and at the 2nd International Theoretical East Asian Linguistics Workshop, held at National Tsing Hua University in June, 2004. I am grateful to the audience for their comments and questions. I have especially benefitted from comments and/or questions from Jun Abe, Joe Emonds, Yoshio Endo, Hiroto Hoshi, Jim Huang, Ruth Kempson, Jonah Lin, Roger Martin, Naoko Okura, Javier Ormazabal, Mamoru Saito, Robert Sanders, Lisa Travis, Dylan Tsai, Yukiko Ueda, Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria, and two anonymous reviewers. Incidentally, a preliminary version of this article appeared as Takahashi (2004), where I fail to make reference to Yoshimura (1992), a very important work on scrambling and parasitic gaps in Japanese, in several places (especially in section 1) where I provide a literature review on parasitic gaps in Japanese. I am sincerely apologetic for this mistake. If there are any inadequacies in the present article as well, I am solely responsible.

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Takahashi, D. Apparent Parasitic Gaps and Null Arguments in Japanese*. J East Asian Linguis 15, 1–35 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-005-2166-1

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