Presuppositional Effects of Scrambling Reconsidered*

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(60) #okane-o dare-ga Taroo-ga nusunda to omotteiru no? money-ACC who-NOM Taro-NOM stole COMP believe Q ‘Who believes that Taro stole (some) money?’ (61) sono okane-o dare-ga Taroo-ga nusunda to omotteiru no? that money-ACC who-NOM Taro-NOM stole COMP believe Q ‘Who believes that Taro stole that money?’ The contrast between (60) and (61) suggests that the NP in the sentence-initial position simply serves to set up the topic of the sentence. Sono okane ‘that money’ must be already introduced in the previous discourse, and hence is not “new information” in that it is already “given.” Still it is not just presupposed but serves a special discourse function. This observation on M- and L-scrambling can be related to the optionality of presuppositional effects of M- and L-scrambling on scrambled indefinites in (53) and (54). M-scrambling and L-scrambling place the scrambled NP in the sentence-initial position. We have just seen that the sentence-initial non-topic NP can receive another kind of focus (introducing a new point of view), in which case it is not defocalized. If the host NP scrambled by M- or L-scrambling is not defocalized, then the stranded FQ does not have a partitive reading. If it is defocalized, the stranded FQ will have a partitive reading. 5. Summary In this paper, I have examined the assignment of the main stress and its relation to the presuppositional interpretation in Japanese. The position immediately preceding the verb is the most deeply embedded position in Japanese, and hence bears the main stress of the sentence (along the lines of Reinhart 1995, 1997), serving as a focus position occupied by a constituent with new information. Elements moved by S-scrambling are not in the most deeply embedded position, and accordingly do not receive the main stress. They are destressed and receive a presuppositional reading. I have also examined the cases where the position immediately preceding the verb is occupied by a destressed and presuppositional part of the sentence, and argued that such cases are possible only if it the verb is also contained in the presupposition. Presuppositional effects of scrambling show up in Japanese when S-scrambling leaves a FQ behind, but are not observed with M-scrambling or L-scrambling. I have made a new proposal for the pragmatic role of the NPs preposed to the sentence-initial position by M-scrambling or L-scrambling: Those NPs can bear a different kind of focus indicating a new “point of view” of the sentence and therefore is not (purely) presuppositional. This is a pragmatic role that can be assigned to an NP in the sentence-initial position, and has nothing to do with the scrambling operation itself. As argued by Reinhart (1995, 1997), focus and presupposition are to be captured at the interface, at which discourse conditions determine whether a derivation with a given focus is appropriate for a given context. While scrambling in Japanese alters syntactic 20
structure and word order, which in turn affects where focus can be placed, scrambling per se does not have any effect on LF. In this sense, scrambling is indeed a semantically vacuous operation as Saito (1989, 1992) argues. I hope the present paper has shown one possible line along which pragmatic effects of scrambling in Japanese can be considered and examined in future work. References Aoyagi, Hiroshi. 1998. On the nature of particles in Japanese and its theoretical implications. Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Chomsky, Noam. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation. In Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology, ed. Danny Steinberg and Leon Jakobovits, 183-216. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1977. Essays on form and interpretation. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1993. A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 239-298. Diesing, Molly. 1992. Indefinites. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dezso, Laszlo. 1982. Studies in syntactic typology and contrastive grammar. The Hague: Mouton. Fujita, Naoya. 1994. On the nature of modification: A study of floating quantifiers and related constructions. Doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. Hoop, Helen de. 1992. Case configuration and noun phrase interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen. [Published by Garland, New York (1996).] Horvath, Julia. 1986. FOCUS in the theory of grammar and the syntax of Hungarian. Dordrecht: Foris. Horvath, Julia. 2000. Interfaces vs. the computational system in the syntax of focus. In Interface strategies, ed. Hans Bennis, Martin Everaert and Eric Reuland, 183-206. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Inoue, Kazuko. 1978. Nihongo-no bumpoo kisoku (Grammatical rules in Japanese). Tokyo: Taishukan. Ishihara, Shinichiro. 2000. Scrambling and its interaction with stress and focus. To appear in MIT working papers in linguistics: Proceedings of the Twelfth Student Conference in Linguistics. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Ishii, Yasuo. 1997. Scrambling and the weak-strong distinction in Japanese. In University of Connecticut working papers in linguistics 8, 89-112. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Ishii, Yasuo. 1999. A note on floating quantifiers in Japanese. In Linguistics: In search of the human mind—A festschrift for Kazuko Inoue, ed. Masatake Muraki and Enoch Iwamoto, 236-267. Tokyo: Kaitakusha. 21
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Presuppositional Effects of Scrambling Reconsidered*

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