Syntactic and Semantic Constraints on Head Gapping in Japanese Relative Clauses

0 Introduction This paper represents the continutation of research into the identiication of the relationship between the head of a relative clause and the clause body, for Japanese. Unlike many languages, a `trace' of the gap associated with the head of a gapping relative clause is not lexically marked in Japanese, and gapping and non-gapping clauses are not explicitly distinguished. Our current research is focused on distinguishing between gapping and non-gapping relative clauses, and determining the identity of the gapped case slot for gapping clauses. 1 Deenitions For the purposes of this paper, a relative clause can be considered simply as a noun phrase (NP) modiied prenominally by a clause (VP), where the modiied NP is refered to as thèclause head' or`head', and the modifying clause as thèclause body'. NP complexes which fullll this simple (VP NP) structural constraint but are preculded from the deenition of relative clauses, include instances where the scope of the clause body modiication extends to the clause-level, and NP heads which cannot exist independently of a modifying clause body (see (Baldwin et al. 1997:2) for further details). Head gapping is then deened as the process whereby the clause head can be considered to have been`gapped' or`moved' from an ellipted case slot within the clause body. Considering example (1) below, thèuser' clause head can be seen to have been gapped from the nominative case slot of the clause body stem verb, `to be satissed'. As such, this provides an example of head gapping, while example (2) provides an example of a non-gapping relative clause. manzoku-sita y uza SUBJ to be satissed-PERF userà satissed user' / `a user who is satissed' (2) >!$D 0U;V katu isi SUBJ to win wilìthe will to win' It is important to note here that, whereas relative clauses in English implicitly incorporate head gapping, our deenition of`relative clause' for Japanese includes both NP complexes that involve head gapping, and those for which the clause body and clause head are syntactically independent. This diierence in the dee-nitions for the two languages is evidenced in the lack of an English gloss for example (2) which incorporates a relative clause. 2 The original gap resolution algorithm The original gap resolution algorithm proposed in our previous paper (Baldwin et al. 1997) is indicated in gure (1) as those rules marked with O m , and is contrasted with the revised algorithm and rules R n. The …