The syntax-phonology interface of Left Branch Extraction

Abstract

Abstract Locality of dislocation has been one of the central issues in linguistics since Ross’s (1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation) seminal paper. One of the locality conditions that Ross describes is the Left Branch Condition, which prohibits the left-branching element in a nominal domain from being extracted. However, Bošković (2005. Left branch extraction, structure of NP, and scrambling. In Joachim Sabel & Mamoru Saito (eds.), The free word order phenomenon: Its syntactic sources and diversity, 13–73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) documents languages that allow Left Branch Extraction (LBE) and lays out three prerequisites for it: the absence of a definite article, the availability of scrambling, and the presence of agreement. If agreement is strictly required, languages lacking φ-agreement should disallow LBE; if agreement is merely the default option, alternative strategies may be available. This paper examines Japanese, which satisfies the first two conditions but not the third, and which nonetheless permits LBE with considerable speaker variation. We argue that Japanese LBE is licensed at the syntax-phonology interface: the operator-variable chain created by LBE must be reflected in prosody, either by being contained within a single intonational phrase or by the extracted element forming an independent intonational phrase marked by comma intonation. Prosodic licensing thus serves as a last-resort alternative to φ-agreement, suggesting that cross-linguistic variation in the availability of LBE is in part a matter of externalization.