What can Japanese Say About Government and Binding?

Abstract

For some years Japanese has been cited as a prime example of a nonconfigurational language. This idea was put forth independently of the main ideas of the government and binding theory and developed in parallel to it at first. What is claimed in essence is that (1) Japanese sentences have a flat structure, lacking the category VP, (2) not only are they flat, but they are like mobiles, lacking linear word order, and (3) finally, sentences with so-called complex predicates like causatives are further flattened, since complex predicates are stored in the lexicon and sentence-embedding is not recognized. This last point is the influence of lexicalism. Descriptively at least, then, the nonconfigurational Japanese syntax appears to be a total return to structuralism: see Farmer (1980), Miyagawa (1980).