Predicate Movement and Multiple Subject Constructions in Japanese

In this paper, we attempt to make explicit the fundamental common factor behind two distinct empirical domains in the Japanese language: the correlation between the semantic properties of Nominative subject and its predicate, and the syntax of the so-called Multiple Subject Construction. Our specific proposal is that those linguistic phenomena can be given a unified explanation naturally in terms of (c) overt syntactic movement of the predicate. The basic conception of predicate movement in Japanese is given in section 3. In particular, on the basis of two independently established diagnostics to distinguish between stative and non-stative predicates, we extend Holmberg and Platzack\u27s (1995) approach to verb second clauses in Germanic languages to Japanese stative sentences, and argue that the copula part of stative predicates undergoes overt movement to C via T, while non-stative predicates remain in their original positions within VP. We see that the proposed theory of predicate movement can provide a natural structural account to the well known contrast that exhaustive listing interpretation is available to the Nominative subject of stative predicates, while the subject in non-stative sentences always receives neutral description without contrastive stress on it. Our theory also allows us to shed new light on Multiple Subject Constructions (MSCs) in Japanese. We show in the second half of this paper that Japanese MSCs can be divided into two types, i.e. S-MSCs and NS-MSCs, whose structural difference arising from the different behavior of their respective predicates brings about various syntactic and semantic contrasts between them