Head-Internal Relative Clauses in Japanese: Movement vs. Agree

Abstract

This thesis presents a new movement-based theory that explains the syntax of head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs) in Japanese in a Minimalist way, which builds on Watanabe’s (1992) operator movement analysis. I argue that an HIRC-DP, which lacks a NP-projection, is semantically defective and cannot be assigned a thematic role by the matrix predicate by Merge, unless it receives semantic argument status from the internal head of the HIRC through operator movement. It is shown that my movement-based theory uniformly accounts for the island-sensitivity of non-wh-headed HIRCs and wh-headed HIRCs as well as their formation better than Watanabe’s (2004) Agree-based theory, which cannot avoid some complications.