Against V-to-T-to-C movement in Japanese and Korean non-constituent coordination

Abstract

This paper argues against syntactic verb movement in Japanese, through a case study of Non-Constituent Coordination (NCC) in Japanese and a dialectal variation of Korean. I provide novel data observing the scope relation between heads and QPs inside NCC, showing that verb movement does NOT take place. The arguments are also supported by the observations on Korean data. Moreover, I defend Fukui and Sakai's (2003) gapping analysis of NCC, providing counterexamples to Kawazoe's (2005) arguments. This study opens a new window by providing two novel syntactic diagnostics for head movement in head-final languages. As a theoretical implication, it insists on the importance of re-examining the existence of head movement in head-final languages, for there is no overt phonological evidence for children to acquire string-vacuous movements.