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Verb-raising and VP-fronting in Japanese

  • Kenshi Funakoshi EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 6, 2019
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Abstract

It is challenging to make empirical arguments either for or against the existence of verb-raising in head-final languages like Japanese since word order facts are not informative in such languages unlike in head-initial languages such as English and French. This article aims to make a novel argument for the existence of verb-raising in Japanese, based on facts about VP-fronting.


Article Note

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1st Workshop of the NINJAL Collaborative Research Project held at NINJAL (December 2016, Tachikawa) and Comparative Syntax and Language Acquisition (CSLA) #7 held at Nanzan University (April 2017, Nagoya).


Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the workshops, anonymous reviewers, Sayaka Funakoshi and Mamoru Saito for their helpful comments and suggestions. The research reported here was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP17K02738 and the collaborative research project “Generative Perspectives on the Syntax and Acquisition of Japanese” at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.

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Published Online: 2019-07-06
Published in Print: 2020-02-25

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