Research overview

My current research focuses on the question of how the meaning of a composite linguistic expression is determined on the basis of the meaning of its parts. I have developed a novel theory of meaning assembly in which semantic composition is performed not when some syntactic constituents ("signs" in the HPSG parlance) are combined to produce a new, larger syntactic constituent but when some prosodic constituents ("domain objects") are merged to produce a new, larger prosodic constituent, and have been trying to evaluate the validity of that theory through examination of long-distance scrambling and various types of non-constituent coordination such as right-node raising.

I am also interested in various descriptive issues in Japanese linguistics, such as the interaction between negation, quantification, and focusing in the language.

Most of my recent papers are available at the "Publications" page as well as at the researchmap site.

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