Clarifying the concept workspace, revising Merge to MERGE, and identifying consequences
Hisatsugu Kitahara (Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, Keio University)
Yoshihito Dobashi (Faculty of Humanities, Niigata University)
Toru Ishii (School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University)
Nobu Goto (Faculty of Business Administration, Toyo University)
Takanori Nakashima (Graduate School, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University)
The strong minimalist thesis SMT takes the computational system CHL for human language to be a"perfect system," meeting the interface conditions in a way that satisfies third factor principles (seeamong others, Chomsky (1995, 2005)). Under SMT, the combinatorial operation of the generative
procedure, which generates hierarchical structures, is expected to be very simple. Presumably, thesimplest possible formulation is a set-formation device that takes X and Y, and forms {X, Y}, which hascome to be called Merge (see Chomsky (2004, 2005)). And unless stipulated, we expect the following
two instances of Merge: External Merge, when X and Y are distinct, and Internal Merge, when X is partof Y.
Does this formulation of Merge make sense? In his most recent work (in a series of lectures in Arizona,and particularly Reading from 2017), Chomsky notes that there is a problem. Merge has been sitting
within a framework, left somewhat vague. That is, to form {XP, YP} (e.g. NP-VP), Merge must be able
to construct syntactic objects SOs in parallel (meaning independently), and bring them together
somewhere. This presupposes that there is a workspace, in which operations such as Merge are being
carried out. But then what is the workspace WS? This question hasn’t been properly answered, andfixing it does have consequences. Chomsky revises Merge to MERGE, an operation on WS, notparticular SO, and takes WS to be the stage of the derivation at any given point. This revision raises all
sorts of questions, and Chomsky et al. (2017) explore some of them. For example, how does aderivation D terminate? They propose that D “may (but need not) terminate whenever WS contains asingle object; if it terminates in any other situation, no coherent interpretation can be assigned.” Or how
does MERGE work? Chomsky et al. (2017) ask, “does MERGE(X, Y) add {X, Y} to WS = [X, Y] (where
X, Y are LIs or complex elements), yielding WS’ = [X, Y, {X, Y}]? Or does it rather replace X and Y in
WS with {X, Y}, yielding WS’ = [{X, Y}] (as assumed in Chomsky 1995:243)?” They point out that “aworkspace WS’ = [X, Y, {X, Y}] derived by MERGE(X, Y) would not ensure that subsequent rules canapply in a determinate fashion: any rule referencing X or Y would ambiguously refer to the individual
objects X, Y or to the terms of K = {X, Y}.”In this workshop, following Chomsky et al. (2017), we would like to explore fundamental questions suchas these, and identify some immediate consequences, drawing data from English and Japanese. We
begin with a brief introduction, which reviews background assumptions and new proposals in
Chomsky’s recent work, and then present three papers: The first paper argues that a terminatedderivation TD corresponds to an interpretive unit, given that the notion of WS makes it possible toexplicitly determine in what situation a derivation may terminate, with reference to the interfaces (cf.
termination by Numeration/Lexical Array (Chomsky 1995, 2000)). It argues that a TD is matched with arelatively large interpretive unit in the semantic and phonological components. Specifically, it shows that
Intonational Phrase, which is often said to tie in with a semantic unit like speech act, can be recast interms of TD, without recourse to the direct phonology-semantics interactions. The second paper
explores consequences of MERGE and Determinacy. Chomsky et al. (2017) propose seven desiderata
that the computational operations of I-language including MERGE are subject to. One of the desiderata
is Determinacy, which bans an ambiguity of rule application. If structural description for a rule holds for
WS where there are more than one accessible copies, its structural change is not unique. This paperargues that such an ambiguous application of a rule violates Determinacy. It is shown that Determinacy
provides us with a unified account of various phenomena like the subject condition, the that-t effects,
the ban against vacuous topicalization, the freezing effects with topics, and improper movement. Finally,
the third paper discusses how adjuncts can be analyzed within the framework outlined by Chomsky etal. (2017). It proposes that removal of SOs from WS may (but need not) take place when MERGE
maps WS to WS’, but it follows that removal of adjuncts takes place when Transfer applies upon thecompletion of each phase. Given this proposal, Determinacy prohibits any rule-application to those SOs
remaining in WS; hence, the adjuncts, being multiple copies, constitute opaque (syntacticallyinapplicable) domain for rules, thereby explaining the adjunct condition effects, the argument/adjunctreconstruction asymmetries, and the backward anaphora constraint.
The workshop aims at gathering and discussing various issues related to these three papers, alongwith other issues discussed in Chomsky et al. (2017), hoping to gain new insights on the nature of CHL,
in particular, how MERGE operates on WS. It also includes the introduction (serving as a mini tutorial)
on recent development in minimalist syntax, which makes this workshop accessible to students andresearchers from all levels.
Selected References
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by Step, ed. by R. Martin, D.
Michaels and J. Uriagereka, 89-155. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Structures and beyond: The cartography ofsyntactic structures, Vol. 3, ed. by Adriana Belletti, 104-131, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Chomsky, Noam. 2005. Three factors in language design, Linguistic Inquiry 36, 1-22.
Chosmky, Noam, Ángel J. Gallego, and Dennis Ott. 2017. Generative grammar and the faculty oflanguage: Insights, questions, and challenges. Unpublished manuscript. lingbuzz/003507.

Workshop: Using treebanks for linguistic research
Organizer and speakers:
Yusuke Kubota (University of Tsukuba), organizer
Misato Ido (NINJAL)
Ayaka Suzuki (NINJAL)
Nobuyoshi Miyoshi (University of Tsukuba)Workshop description:
Although corpus-based study has become fairly common in descriptive grammar research(Miyake 2017), in theoretical research based on linguistic theories such as generative grammar,
the use of corpora is still at an early exploratory stage. In particular, many important issues suchas the methodology for using real attested data in (theoretical) linguistic research and practicalissues that working researchers should be aware of when dealing with attested data have not been
discussed adequately. (See Meurers (2005) for a seminal work that discusses various issues in thisdomain.) One reason for this somewhat unfortunate situation is that corpora representing detailed
grammatical information are not easily available (Ogawa et al. 2016). In theoretical syntax andsemantics, the main objects of research are the structures of sentences and the meanings of words
and sentences for which structural information is essential. For this reason, it is difficult to utilize a corpus for full-scale research unless one can search for examples based on such detailed
grammatical information in the corpus.
In view of the above situation, a new type of corpus called the NINJAL Parsed Corpus of Modern Japanese (NPCMJ) is currently being developed at the National Institute of Japanese Language
and Linguistics. The NPCMJ corpus is a treebank (i.e. a syntactically annotated corpus) primarily
designed as a resource for linguistic research. It contains fine-grained syntactic information indispensable for serious linguistic research in the above-mentioned sense. It is expected that this new1

corpus will facilitate a new type of linguistic research and will ultimately bring theoretical linguistics research into a new stage as a true empirical science. This workshop introduces three casestudies of linguistic research using the NPCMJ corpus, which, though preliminary, already corroborate this expectation. In theoretical linguistics research, the method of collecting data based
solely on introspection of a small number of native speakers has been predominant. However, as
discussed in detail in the three papers presented in this workshop, this traditional approach can be
fruitfully complemented in various ways with a more data-oriented type of approach based on large
scale attested data. The goal of the present workshop is to consider the possibilities and challengesof linguistics as a true empirical science through introducing concrete linguistic case studies using
the NPCMJ corpus.

Abstracts of papers:
Paper 1: Misato Ido (NINJAL) ‘Licensing of adverbial NPIs beyond clause boundaries’
As a case study using the NPCMJ corpus, this presentation examines a phenomenon in which adverbial negative polarity items (NPIs) in Japanese are licensed by negation beyond clause boundaries. In particular, I aim to show in this case study that using corpus data contributes not only
to descriptive linguistics but also to theoretical linguistics. It is known that Japanese NPIs mustnormally appear in the same clause as negation unlike English NPIs such as any. However, Kudo
(2000) and Matsui (2003), among others, pointed out that adverbial NPIs can be licensed beyond
clause boundaries in copular sentences with predicative nominals. This presentation demonstrates
that the rich syntactic annotation of NPCMJ makes it possible to extract attested data from thecorpus verifying the phenomenon pointed out by Matsui. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of
the search results allows us to identify another group of adverbs that are similar to NPIs, which,
together with NPI adverbs, point to a hitherto unnoticed generalization. Specifically, we identify
three types of adverbs from the search results from the corpus: mettani-type (‘rarely’) NPI adverbs;
sonnani-type (‘so much’) NPI adverbs; and syottyuu-type (‘quite often’) non-NPI adverbs. I will2

show that these three types of adverbs have different types of meaning and distribution respectively. These syntactic and semantic features bring up a new research question pertaining to thesyntax-semantics interface: despite showing different meanings and distributions, why do thesethree groups of adverbs occur commonly in noun modifier clauses for predicative nominals?
Paper 2: Ayaka Suzuki (NINJAL) ‘Temporal interpretations and tense forms of the toki-clause’
In this presentation, I argue that observations obtained from the NPCMJ corpus contribute to theinvestigation of the interpretive mechanism of the Japanese toki-clause. Specifically, an analysis
using a parsed-corpus enables us to reexamine the assumptions that have been presupposed in previous studies, and to discover an analytical viewpoint that has been overlooked. Previous studies
on the toki-clause have focused on the combinations of tense forms in the subordinate clause (SC)and the matrix clause (MC) (Mihara and Hamada 1996; Funahashi 2006; Oshima 2011), and hypothesized that if SC and MC have different tense forms, the tense in SC is interpreted relative toMC, and if they have the same tense form, the tense in SC is interpreted relative to the speech time.
However, the patterns reflected in the attested data obtained from the NPCMJ corpus lead to a reexamination of this hypothesis. The key factor that affects the interpretation is whether the SC tenseis the ru-form (i.e. the non-past form) or the ta-form (i.e. the past form) rather than whether the MC
and SC tense forms are the same or different. Moreover, we can find counterexamples for previous
studies’ hypothesis when SC has the ru-form. In order to give an explanation to these observations,
we have to take the difference between the ru-form and the ta-form into consideration and assume
that the fundamental meaning of the morpheme toki is to encode the notion of ‘simultaneity’. I
show that ‘simultaneity’ of toki restricts the possible interpretation. The proposed analysis derives
the descriptive generalization about the possible combinations of tense forms noted in the previous
literature as a side effect of this fundamental meaning of the morpheme toki, similar in spirit to theaccount of Kaufmann and Miyachi (2011).

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Paper 3: Nobuyoshi Miyoshi (University of Tsukuba) ‘Distribution of non-restrictive adnominal
clause in different text genres’
Adnominal clauses in Japanese are known to have both restrictive and non-restrictive uses. The
restrictive use functions as denoting a proper subset of the set of objects identified by the headnoun, and the non-restrictive use adds some information to the head noun. Some previous studies
have already referred to discourse functions and semantic classifications of the non-restrictive use.
For example, according to Masuoka (1995), the two main functions of the non-restrictive use are‘adding information to the head noun’ and ‘adding information to the matrix clause’. The latter isfurther subdivided into ‘contrast’, ‘sequence’, ‘reason/cause’, and ‘accompanying circumstance’.
However, the function of the non-restrictive use in actual discourses has not been studied in adequate detail in the previous literature. The present study attempts to clarify the distribution andfunction of the non-restrictive use by closely examining its distributions in different text genresusing the NPCMJ corpus. In the present survey, the following preliminary results were obtained.
First, in expository or reporting texts such as newspaper, more instances of ‘adding information to
the head noun’ were found than instances of ‘adding information to the matrix clause’. A possible
explanation for this tendency is that discourse-new proper nouns and technical terms frequently
occur in this type of text. Second, in novels, though the non-restrictive use was not as frequent,
instances of the non-restrictive use in various semantic functions (including different subclasses of‘adding information to the matrix clause’) were found. This is arguably due to the fact that novels
differ from other text genres such as newspapers in exploiting a wider range of rhetorical strategies
in discourse, such as scene setting and establishing causal relationships among events.

References
Funahashi, Mizuki. 2006. Tokisetsu-no kaishaku-ni-kansuru goyooronteki koosatsu (Pragmatic
factors in the interpretation of toki-clauses). Nihongo Bunpoo 6(1):106–121.

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Kaufmann, Stefan and Misa Miyachi. 2011. On the temporal interpretation of Japanese temporalclauses. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 20(1):33–76.
Kudo, Mayumi. 2000. Hitei-no hyoogen (Expressions of negation). In S. Kinsui, M. Kudo, andY. Numata, eds., Toki, Hitei to Toritate (Tense, Negation and Focusing). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Masuoka, Takashi. 1995. Rentaisetsu no hyogen to shumeishi no shudaisei (Expression of adnominal clause and topicality of head noun). In T. Masuoka, H. Noda, and Y. Numata, eds., Nihongo
no Shudai to Toritate (Topic and Toritate in Japanese), 139–157. Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers.
Matsui, Haruko. 2003. Hitei-kyokusei-koomoku-no setsu-o koe-ta kooo (Negative polarity agreement across clause boundaries). Nihongo Bunpoo 3(1):117–126.
Meurers, W. Detmar. 2005. On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics: Case studies
from the syntax of German. Lingua 115(11):1619–1639.
Mihara, Ken-ichi and Miwa Hamada. 1996. Rentai-syuusyoku-gata-hukushi-setsu-no setsu-to
tensu (Tenses in noun-modyfing adverbial clauses). Nihongo/Nihon-Bunka-Kenkyuu 6:31–41.
Miyake, Tomohiro. 2017. Bunpoosei-handan-ni-motozuku kenkyuu-no kanoosei (On the potentialof grammaticality judgment as a reliable research method). Nihongo Bunpoo 17(2):3–19.
Ogawa, Yoshiki, Akiko Nagano, and Akira Kikuchi. 2016.

Gaikan: Gengo-henka/hen’i-no

kenkyuu-to koopasu (Overview: Language change/variation and corpora).

In Y. Ogawa,A. Nagano, and A. Kikuchi, eds., Koopasu-kara Wakaru Gengo-henka/hen’i-to Gengoriron (Discovering Language Change and Language Variation from Corpora), 1–28. Tokyo:
Kaitakusha.
Oshima, David Y. 2011. On the interpretation of toki-clause: Beyond the absolute/relative dichotomy. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 20(1):1–32.

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