LF Subjacency Condition in Japanese

Abstract

Japanese is one of the languages which do not have syntactic wh-movement, i.e., all wh-movement takes place in the LF component. The issue of whether or not the Subjacency Condition holds in such a language has been somewhat controversial in the literature: some linguists claim that there are no Subjacency effects in LF in Japanese (Huang (1982), Saito (1985), Lasnik and Saito (1984, 1989)); while others argue that Japanese actually shows LF Subjacency effects (Fukui (1988), Hasegawa (1985), Nishigauchi (1986, 1990), Pesetsky (1987)). In this paper, we will look at their claims and certain problems for their analyses, and argue that we need something like Subjacency effects to explain data which show incremental grammatical judgements (Section 1). Also, the status of the Subjacency Condition itself seems far from being settled. It has been widely assumed to be a condition on movement (Chomsky (1973, 1977, 1981), Huang (1982), Pesetsky (1982), Lasnik & Saito (1984, 1989), among others); others have argued it is a condition on representations (Freidin (1978), Freidin & Lasnik (1981), McDaniel (1989), Browning (1991)); and the question is left open in Chomsky (1986). We will address this issue briefly and give some data which might support the claim that the Subjacency Condition is a condition on representations at LF as well as at S-Structure (Section 2).