(36) Japanese:
a. John-ga Mary-ni sono hon-o watasita
John-NOM Mary-DAT that book-ACC handed
‘John handed that book to Mary.’
b. Mary-ni John-ga sono hon-o watasita
c. sono hon-o John-ga Mary-ni watasita
d. sono hon-o Mary-ni John-ga watasita
e. Mary-ni sono hon-o John-ga watasita
In contrast to Japanese, English (among many other languages) does not exhibit
optional scrambling, which follows from the fact that such nPs have φ-features
and they are “frozen” by the EIC in positions forming a φ-equilibrium, as
depicted in (37).
(37) English-type: nPs are “frozen” in positions forming a φ-equilibrium:
n[φ] NP T[]
...tnP...φIn contrast, there is no φ-equilibrium in Japanese-type languages. Thus nPs can
freely move around without getting frozen via the EIC.
We saw in this section that a single parametric statement, namely that Japanese
lacks active φ-features, yields a number of intricate consequences in Japanese
syntax (see Narita and Fukui 2012, 2014 for further discussion). No brute-force
stipulation on the constituents of UG is necessary to account for this “macro-
parametric” variation, simplifying linguistic theory to a considerable extent.
6 Conclusion
In this chapter, we argued for and extended Fukui’s (2011) hypothesis that
linguistic computation is essentially driven by symmetry, deriving the overall
directionality from F-asymmetry to F-symmetry in (24) (repeated here as (38)).
(38) a. F-asymmetry b. F-symmetry
⇒introduced by EM ⇒ achieved by IM, head-
movement, and agreement
⇒formed before (b) ⇒formed after (a)
⇒exhibits endocentricity ⇒ exhibits no endocentricity
(exocentric)
⇒contributes to lexical, ⇒contributes to discourse-related,
“d-structure” interpretation “s-structure” interpretation
(predicate-argument (quantifi cational, topic-focus, etc.)
structure, selection, etc.)
24 Hiroki Narita and Naoki Fukui