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Restructuring and focus in Japanese

  • Mina Sugimura EMAIL logo and Yoichi Miyamoto ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: October 30, 2025
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Abstract

This paper examines a particular purpose expression (PE), namely a clause with a phrase headed by the morpheme -ni, which we dub niP. Previous literature has stated that restructuring is regulated by an intervening element between the niP and the matrix predicate, but we provide apparent counterexamples. Considering dialectal data from western Japan, we propose that the nominative case (NOM) is licensed by the amalgam of the potential affix and focus. We then show that our counterexamples are associated with the NOM-marked NP being focused and argue that the focused NOM-marked NP is subject to licensing by the amalgam of the potential affix and focus. We also show that the excorporation-based proposal enables us to capture the effect of restructuring without relying on the pre-minimalist restructuring operation.


Corresponding author: Mina Sugimura, Ritsumeikan University, 56-1 Tojiin-Kita-machi Kita-ku, Kyoto 603-8577, Japan, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Jon Clenton for his editorial support with an earlier version of this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough, insightful, and constructive feedback. This is a revised and extended version of the paper presented at the English Society of Japan 14th International Spring Forum in May 2021. This research was supported in part by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (No. 19K13188) for the first author and the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No. 23K00589) for the second author. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Received: 2023-07-23
Accepted: 2024-05-14
Published Online: 2025-10-30
Published in Print: 2025-11-25

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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