Compound Wh-Questions and Fragment Answers in Japanese: Implications for the Nature of Ellipsis

1 Compound Wh-Questions and the Ban on Phrasal Fragments

Japanese allows a (nonecho) wh-in-situ to be located within a compound, as exemplified by (1Q) (see, e.g., Kageyama 1993:336). Daregonomi (meaning ‘to whose taste’) in (1Q) exhibits rendaku (sequential voicing, a hallmark of Japanese compounding), by which the initial [-voice] consonant of the second noun (N₂) becomes [+voice]. Furthermore, the lexical accent of the first noun (N₁) shifts to the initial syllable of N₂, which is again typical of Japanese compounding. Thus, [_N1 dáre] + [_N2 kónomi] becomes [_N [_N1 dare]-[_N2 gónomi]]. Below, lexical pitch accents are represented by acute accents.

(1)

We dub the construction in (1Q) the compound wh-question. Compound wh-questions can be responded to with sentential answers like (1A₁) or fragment answers like (1A₂).

Interestingly, compound wh-questions disallow some fragment answers that their semantically equivalent phrasal wh-questions allow. Compare (1Q) with its synonymous phrasal counterpart (2).

(2)

(1A₂) and (3a) are felicitous fragment answers to both (1Q) and (2). In contrast, (3c) and (3d) are infelicitous answers to (1Q), though they are perfectly acceptable as answers to (2). See also (3b), whose acceptability as a fragment answer to (1Q) varies among speakers to a certain extent; the same speakers find it perfect as a fragment answer to (2).

(3)

The infelicitous fragment answers (3c–d) to the compound wh-question (1Q) are phrasal constituents that cannot fit into a compound, as shown by (4c–d) (the nonelliptical sentential answers corresponding to (3c–d)). (3b) as a fragment answer to (1Q) exhibits the same degree of acceptability as (4b). Repetition or omission of arguments (minnáwa and intéria-o) does not affect the acceptability (indicated by . . .).

(4)

The deviance of (4b–d) is presumably due to lexical integrity, that is, the general tendency to avoid phrasal constituents within compounds (e.g., Di Sciullo and Williams 1987). This can be corroborated by comparing the examples in (4) with the perfectly acceptable examples in (5), where the constituents are located in NP-argument positions.

(5)

Apart from some marginal cases such as (4b) (see Kageyama 1993, Sato 2010, Nishiyama 2017), Japanese compounds exclude phrasal elements that require genuine syntactic computations, such as relative CPs in need of clausal syntax (4c) and QPs in need of Quantifier Raising or some sort of scope-taking operation (4d).

We have observed that unlike phrasal wh-questions, compound wh-questions cannot allow phrasal elements like (3b–d) as their fragment answers, and that such fragment answers yield more or less the same degree of acceptability as the lexical integrity violations observed in (4b–d). This is summarized as the generalization in (6).¹

(6) For wh-questions with a compound [_N W-Y]/[_N Y-W], W a wh-word and Y a N(oun), the felicity of the fragment answer X (da/desu) correlates with the availability of a compound [_N X-Y]/[_N Y-X].

2 Implications for the Identity Condition on Deletion

The generalization in (6) has significant implications for the identity condition on deletion, one of the controversial issues in the study of ellipsis. Merchant (2001) and others argue that some sort of semantic identity is sufficient to license deletion, whereas Chung (2013) and others claim that deletion must be conditioned by structural identity. We will argue that the contrast between compound wh-questions and phrasal wh-questions constitutes a new piece of evidence for structural identity over semantic identity.

To our knowledge, the most influential hypothesis concerning semantic identity is Merchant’s (2001:26) “focus-assisted” mutual entailment (FAME), which we state as in (7).

(7) An expression E can be deleted only if E has a salient antecedent A and, modulo ∃-type shifting, A entails F-clo(E) and E entails F-clo(A) (FAME(A, E) for short).

We can obtain F-clo(X) by replacing the focus-marked part of X with an ∃-bound variable of the appropriate type. For...