A Categorial Treatment of Scrambling in Japanese

Abstract

In generative studies of Japanese, the term 'Scrambling' has been used to account for the intuitively obvious relationship bebween sentences like (la) and (lb). (1) a. John-ga (subj) Bill-o (obj) mi-ta. (see-past) b. Bill-o (obj) John-ga (subj) mi-ta. (see-past) 'John saw Bill.' The phenomenon has presented linguists with an interesting problem. especially in conjunction with treatments of other linguistic phenomena (e.g., Case - Marking, Reflexivization, etc.). This paper presents a categorial treatment of Scrambling in a simplex sentence. The basic framework has been taken from Montague's Universal Grammar (1970) and Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English (1973). The purpose of this paper is two -fold. It attempts to provide (i) a categorial syntax capable of directly generating scrambled variants of a canonical form, and (ii) a semantic account for the truth functional meaning equivalence among variants. While a direct generation approach is not new (e.g., Whitman (1979), Hale (1980), Farmer (1980), Chomsky (1980), Ostler (1980), etc.), there is yet no universally accepted analysis that offers a rigorous semantic account.