The semantic inertness of medial right-node raising in Japanese

The results of two questionnaire studies are presented which indicate that medial RNR (i.e. a type of right-node raising that places all or part of the right-node-raised material at a location other than the right edge of the final conjunct) in Japanese cannot affect the truth-conditional interpretation of noun phrases, unlike medial RNR in English, which has been shown not to be semantically inert by Kubota (2014) and Warstadt (2015). It is argued that this finding and one of the observations made in Chaves (2014) are problematic for the Categorial Grammar-based accounts of medial RNR proposed in Kubota (op. cit.) and Warstadt (op. cit.). A modified version of the HPSG-based account of medial RNR is then proposed which incorporates the hypothesis that medial RNR is semantically inert in those languages where conjuncts are scope islands.

(S. Yatabe, "The semantic inertness of medial right-node raising in Japanese", in Nihon Gengogakkai Dai-151-kai Taikai Yokô-shû (Proceedings of the 151st Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan), Linguistic Society of Japan, Kyoto, 2015, pp. 318-323.)

Shûichi Yatabe
http://phiz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yatabe/