Symmetric Projection in Japanese and English : A Modification of Stabler's Parsing/Generation Model for Minimalist Grammar

The essence of standard X-bar theory is that structure building is asymmetric in the sense that a complex structure inherits properties from only one of its constituents. There are some structures, however, that are best analyzed as reflecting the properties of all their constituents. This kind of symmetric projection should in principle be allowed within the minimalist program if the union of the features of all the constituents contains no incompatible features. This claim is supported by the fact that Japanese wh-phrases marked with ka can function as indefinites as well as interrogatives. Under the assumptions that a wh-phrase with ka has the same internal structure regardless of its interpretations and that ka has no category feature, merging a wh-phrase with ka is a case of symmetric projection. The properties of both ka and its sister wh-phrase interact with those of the predicate taking the ka-phrase as its argument or adjunct, which ensures that an appropriate interpretation will be picked up from the two possible interpretations of the ka-phrase.