The syntax and semantics of Japanese internally- and doubly-headed relatives

Abstract

This paper proposes novel syntactic and semantic analyses of Japanese IHRCs and of a variety of DHRCs labelled ‘integrated.’ The analyses differ non-trivially from all earlier analyses known to us, both in orientation and in technical implementation, and their principal raison d’être is to capture, with minimal appeal to stipulation, the ways in which these two constructions differ from each other, from other relative constructions of Japanese, and from discourses with anaphoric dependencies. Our analysis of IHRCs builds on that of Landman (2016), and our analysis of integrated DHRCs is critically compared and contrasted with that of Erlewine & Gould (2016), who aimed at a maximal analytical unification of Japanese EHRCs, IHRCs and DHRCs, failing to note some of their distinguishing properties and sometimes relying on incorrect empirical assumptions.

Keywords

• Key words: internally headed relatives
• doubly headed relatives
• event(ualitie)s
• Champollion event semantics
• island constraints
• Kuroda’s Relevancy Condition