Ultimate Pied-Piping in Japanese
Hisashi Morita
Aichi Prefectural University
In this talk I would like to show that there are cases in which entire sentences arepied-piped, which has received little attention although clausal pied-piping has been
extensively discussed. To give one example, intervention effects are unobserved innan-CL-no NP ‘How many-CL-Gen NP’ questions in Japanese. Consider the following
questions:(1) a. ??Ken-ka Mary-ga nani-o yomimasita ka?
-or-Nom what-Acc read Q‘What did Ken or Mary read?’b. Ken-ka Mary-ga nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasita ka?
-or-Nom how-CL-Gen book-Acc readQ‘How many books did Ken or Mary read?’(2) a. *Mary-sika nani-o yomimasendesita ka?
-only what-Acc read.not
Q‘What did only Mary read?’b. Mary-sika nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasendesita ka?
-only how-CL-Gen book-Acc read.not
Q‘How many books did only Mary read?’
Examples a above show that interveners such as disjunction ka and an NPI sika cannot
precede wh-expressions, which is called intervention effects. However, if nan-CL-no NP
is employed, intervention effects are now unobserved.
Although there are several ways to explain this phenomenon (cf. Tomioka(2007)), this presentation will show that syntactic accounts such as Hagstrom (1998)
and Morita (2009) will nicely account for it. Specifically, this talk assumes thatintervention effects in Japanese arise when Agree between C and a wh-expression isblocked by an intervener. Then the talk will claim that intervention effects areunobserved in nan-CL-no NP questions because the entire interrogative sentences canbe pied-piped, in which case the (nuclear) scope of question and the scope of restriction
coincide. I will call this phenomenon ultimate pied-piping in the talk.
As one piece of evidence, if ittai ‘the hell or in the world’ is placed before
nan-CL-no NP, intervention effects are observed as follows:(3) a. ??Ken-ka Mary-ga ittai nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasita ka?
-or-Nom the hell how-CL-Gen book-Acc read Q‘How many books did Ken or Mary read?’b. ittai Ken-ka Mary-ga nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasita ka?
(4) a. ??Mary-sika ittai nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasendesita ka?
-only the.hell how-CL-Gen book-Acc read.notQ‘How many books did only Mary read?’b. ittai Mary-sika nan-satu-no hon-o yomimasendesita ka?
According to Pesetsky (1987), ittai must precede (or c-command) a phrase which goes
through (covert) wh-movement. In (3)a and (4)a, ittai allows the movement of thewh-expression alone, but this movement will be subject to the intervention effect, whereka ‘or’ and sika ‘only’ serve as interveners. On the other hand, pied-piping of the entiresentences, which will nullify the intervention effect, is prevented because of ittai. This

is why (3)a and (4)a are ungrammatical. In contrast, (3)b and (4)b are grammaticalbecause ittai can c-command the entire sentences, and hence, pied-piping of the wholesentences are allowed.
The big question is why nan-CL-no NP allows ultimate pied-piping whereas
other wh-expressions do not. It is a standard assumption that a raised material functions
as the restriction of a wh-operator, and the semantic content of that material ispresupposed. If so, in the case of wh-expressions such as dare ‘who’ and nani ‘what’, itis redundant to raise the entire question. The following two semantic representations
show that pied-piping of the entire sentence does not add any semantic effect:(5) a. px[Ken or Mary read thing(x) & p = Ken or Mary read thing(x)]b. px[thing(x) & p = Ken or Mary read x]
Ultimate pied-piping is applied in (5)a while only nani ‘what’ is raised in (5)b. (5)a is
nonsensical because it means something like ‘Among things Ken or Mary read, whatdid Ken or Mary read?’ Since it is semantically anomalous or vacuous, ultimate
pied-piping is disallowed in (1)a or (2)a.
On the other hand, questions such as (1)b can be derived in two ways:(6) a. pnnx [Ken or Mary read thing(x) & p = Ken or Mary read thing(x)]b. pnnx [thing(x) & p = Ken or Mary read x](For the sake of simplicity, ‘nx’ means that there are n instances of x.) In (6)b, only thewh-expression is raised. It is semantically fine, but its derivation is blocked due tointervention effects. In contrast, ultimate pied-piping is applied in (6)a. In this case,however, no semantic anomaly arises because it is possible and semantically
non-redundant to ask ‘Among things Ken or Mary read, how many did Ken or Maryread? (namely, how many are they?)’ Accordingly, ultimate pied-piping is possible innan-CL-no NP questions, and intervention effects are circumvented in (1)b and (2)b.
This talk will also present cases where ultimate pied-piping is possible evenwith another type of wh-expressions such as indirect questions, and discuss why that isthe case.
If the present claim is correct, it will give further support to the syntactic
account of the intervention effect rather than the pragmatic one. Furthermore, thepresent claim will not only support Chomsky’s (1995) copy theory but also add an
important consequence in that some redundant (semantic) content can exist in more than
one copy, and will argue against Arregi (2003), who holds that clausal pied-piping has
no semantic effect whatsoever.
References
Arregi, Karlos (2003) “Clausal Pied-Piping,” Natural Language Semantics 11, 115-143.
Chomsky, Noam (1995) The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Hagstrom, Paul Alan (1998) Decomposing Questions, doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Morita, Hisashi (2009) “Covert Pied-Piping in Japanese Wh-questions,” English
Linguistics 21, 21-41.
Pesetsky, David (1987) “Wh-in-situ: Movement and Unselective Binding,” in E.J.
Reuland and A. ter Meulen (eds.), The Representation of (In)definiteness, MITpress, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tomioka, Satoshi (2007) “Pragmatics of LF intervention effects: Japanese and Koreaninterrogatives,” Journal of Pragmatics 39, 1570-1590.