Abstract for Naoko Tomioka's talk

Clause structure and the distribution of adjuct PPs in Japanese
Naoko Tomioka (Universite du Quebec a Montreal)
January 30, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this talk, I present a novel empirical argument in support of the presence of the functional node which is crucially involved in event modification (the node E). The first part of the talk focuses on the distribution of adjunct PPs in Japanese, which differs from their English counterparts in a systematic way - unlike English PPs, Japanese adjunct PPs pattern with event-modifying adverbials in their distribution. In the second part of the talk, I show that adjunct PPs may not modify a certain type of "embedded clause" -e.g. embedded clauses in the restructuring context and clauses that express the caused sub-event in the lexical causative construction. I argue that these "embedded clauses" structurally correspond to VPs or CausePs, but crucially lack the E node, and I thus conclude that event modification requires the presence of this particular functional node.