The main concern of the present thesis is the nature of constructions which involve WH-phrases in natural language, mostly in Japanese and English. We will address the two questions about this type of construction: (i) What is the nature of the locality principle that governs the syntax and semantic interpretation of constructions involving WH-phrases? (ii) What is the quantificational force of the WH-phrase? We will develop an analysis of WH-constructions in Japanese, where it is argued that a WH-phrase that occurs in an A-position in S-structure is moved to an A'-position in LF. We will discuss some superficial asymmetry that LF movement in Japanese exhibits with respect to the effects of the locality condition of Subjacency. While it obeys the WH-Island Condition effect, it appears to be free from the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC) effect: sentences which contain a WH-phrase within a complex NP at S-structure are generally grammatical. We claim in chapter 2 that the WH-phrase in the problematic sentences does not move out of the complex NP, but it moves only within the relative clause. This triggers movement of the entire complex NP to the operator position of the main clause, thus no violation of the CNPC is involved. Chapter 3 will discuss the theoretical apparatus which substantiates the proposal in chapter 2. As for the second question, we will discuss some sentences in Japanese and English where WH-phrases can be understood as behaving as the universal quantifier. We argue, in chapters 4 and 5, that WH-phrases are devoid of semantic content and should be treated as 'variables' in the logical representation. The quantificational force of the WH-phrase is determined by a certain class of quantificational elements under certain structural conditions that hold with the WH-phrase that has undergone movement at LF. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss problems raised by pronominal coindexing that holds between a pronoun and a WH-phrase with reference to the restrictions on Indirect Binding.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7421 |
| Date | 01 January 1986 |
| Creators | NISHIGAUCHI, TAISUKE |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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