Scrambling in Japanese

[Ulrich Germann]

Hi Tibor,

First of all, it's dare=ni=mo, not daremo=ni.

Secondly, the order of complements is usually determined by discourse
factors, in particular focus. As a rule of thumb, the "newer" an
entity is to the discourse domain, the later it occurs in the sentence.
Even though I never validated it systematically on real data,
my intuition is that
   John=ga Mary=ni hon=wo age.ta (koto)
is most likely to occur in a context where no book has been mentioned
before (thus: "John gave Mary *A* book"), while the construction
   John=ga hon=wo Mary=ni age.ta (koto)
would be preferred if a book had been mentioned before (thus: "John
gave *THE* book to Mary).

For the sentence
   John=ga dareka=wo dare=ni=mo syookai-si.ta (koto)
I'm inclined to give clear preference to the interpretation
   ExAy: introduce(John, x, y),
(although I'd like to see a natural context where anyone would
actually say that), while I'd prefer
   John=ga dare=ni=mo dareka=wo syookai-si.ta (koto)
for the other interpretation.

Moving either of the dare(=ka/=ni=mo) constituents in front of John
strikes me as very odd, and I'd like to see some real-world example
before I'm willing to accept that as 'possible'.

You should also keep in mind that Japanese has more to offer
for 'someone' and 'everybody' than just 'dare=ka' and 'dare=mo':
In addition to 'dare=ka' there's also (at least!) 'aru hito' (some
certain person), and for 'everybody', there's also 'minna'.

So, for ExAy: ... you might also find something like
   John.san=wa aru hito=wo dare=ni=mo syookai-si.ta.
I could imagine this silly example to occur in some classroom setting
where the class has read a story or seen a video and now the
teacher wants them to guess who that person might have been that
John so eagerly introduced to everybody. ("Bideo=de=wa John.san=wa
aru hito=wo dare=ni=mo syookai-si.masi.ta=ne. Kono hito=wa,
dare=des.yoo=ka?")

Now, let's assume that John doesn't introduce just somebody, but
three people. In this case,
   John=ga dare=ni=mo san.nin=wo syookai-si.ta (koto)
would be indeed ambiguous with respect to the scope of the
quantifiers. However, I wouldn't accept any scrambling of the
constituents in this case. (For
   J.=ga san.nin=wo dare=ni=mo syookai-si.ta (koto)
I'd be prefer the reading 'introduced the (aforementioned) three
people to everyone'.

Of course, I'm not a native speaker, and I'm looking forward to
counterarguments!

Best regards - Uli

******************************************

Tibor Kiss wrote:
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I have a question concerning scrambling in Japanese: Given ditransitive
> constructions in Japanese, is it possible to scramble both objects in front
> of (i.e. to the left of) the subject, as illustrated in (1)?
>
> (1) Daremo-ni     dareka-o          John-ga syookaisita (koto).
>      everyone-dat somebody-acc John-nom introduced
>
> Moreover, if (1) is well-formed, is it ambiguous, as e.g. (2) is? I dare
> say it's not.
>
> (2) John-ga    dareka-o          daremo-ni     syookaisita (koto).
>      John-nom somebody-acc everyone-dat introduced
>
> It has been claimed by various authors that examples like (2) are
> ambiguous. It would follow from analyses like Hoji (1986) that (1) is
> ambiguous, too. Mysteriously, the analysis put forth in Aoun/Li (1993)
> suggests that (1) is not possible at all, because they assume that
> scrambling in Japanese is NP-movement to SpecIP. Since there is only one
> SpecIP, (1) should not be possible.
>
> Thanx in advance,
>
> Tibor
>

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